YOLO-Net: A lightweight edge-enhanced detection model for small-object recognition in tennis match scenarios
TL;DR
YOLO-Net is an efficient, accurate, and deployable solution for applications such as referee assistance, tactical analysis, and intelligent broadcasting in tennis competitions, and is demonstrated to be efficient, accurate, and deployable for real-time inference.
Abstract
The rapid advancement of deep learning has enabled intelligent analysis in professional sports, yet tennis remains particularly challenging due to small and fast-moving objects, frequent occlusions, and complex backgrounds. To address these difficulties, we propose YOLO-Net, a lightweight detection framework tailored for tennis event analysis. Built upon YOLO11n, the framework integrates three task-oriented improvements: a C3k-MSEIS module for multi-scale edge enhancement and dual-domain feature selection to refine fine-grained boundaries; an ECA channel attention mechanism inserted after C2PSA to strengthen inter-channel dependency modeling and improve feature discriminability; and a Focaler-IoU loss function to emphasize hard and small samples while reducing localization errors. In addition, we construct and annotate a dedicated tennis dataset containing 6,648 images across three categories—player, racquet, and ball—covering diverse scenes, camera angles, and lighting conditions. Experimental results show that YOLO-Net achieves 84.5% precision and 78.2% mAP@0.5 with only 2.58M parameters, outperforming the YOLO11n baseline by 2.5% in precision and 0.9% in mAP while maintaining real-time inference. These findings demonstrate that YOLO-Net is an efficient, accurate, and deployable solution for applications such as referee assistance, tactical analysis, and intelligent broadcasting in tennis competitions.