YOLOv8-ACU: improved YOLOv8-pose for facial acupoint detection

Introduction Acupoint localization is integral to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) acupuncture diagnosis and treatment. Employing intelligent detection models for recognizing facial acupoints can substantially enhance localization accuracy. Methods This study introduces an advancement in the YOLOv8-pose keypoint detection algorithm, tailored for facial acupoints, and named YOLOv8-ACU. This model enhances acupoint feature extraction by integrating ECA attention, replaces the original neck module with a lighter Slim-neck module, and improves the loss function for GIoU. Results The YOLOv8-ACU model achieves impressive accuracy, with an mAP@0.5 of 97.5% and an mAP@0.5–0.95 of 76.9% on our self-constructed datasets. It also marks a reduction in model parameters by 0.44M, model size by 0.82 MB, and GFLOPs by 9.3%. Discussion With its enhanced recognition accuracy and efficiency, along with good generalization ability, YOLOv8-ACU provides significant reference value for facial acupoint localization and detection. This is particularly beneficial for Chinese medicine practitioners engaged in facial acupoint research and intelligent detection.