# CST-YOLO: A Novel Method for Blood Cell Detection Based on Improved YOLOv7 and CNN-Swin Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14590 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14590/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [RepVGG: Making VGG-style ConvNets Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03697/) (2021)
- [CSPNet: A New Backbone that can Enhance Learning Capability of CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11929/) (2019)
- [YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02976/) (2022)
- [PP-YOLOE: An evolved version of YOLO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16250/) (2022)
- [Scale Match for Tiny Person Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10664/) (2019)
- [SwinNet: Swin Transformer drives edge-aware RGB-D and RGB-T salient object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05585/) (2022)
- [YOLOv6 v3.0: A Full-Scale Reloading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05586/) (2023)
- [Designing Network Design Strategies Through Gradient Path Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04800/) (2022)
- [PP-YOLOv2: A Practical Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10419/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MS-YOLO: A Multi-Scale Model for Accurate and Efficient Blood Cell Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03972/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blood cell detection is a typical small-scale object detection problem in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a CST-YOLO model for blood cell detection based on YOLOv7 architecture and enhance it with the CNN-Swin Transformer (CST), which is a new attempt at CNN-Transformer fusion. We also introduce three other useful modules: Weighted Efficient Layer Aggregation Networks (W-ELAN), Multiscale Channel Split (MCS), and Concatenate Convolutional Layers (CatConv) in our CST-YOLO to improve small-scale object detection precision. Experimental results show that the proposed CST-YOLO achieves 92.7%, 95.6%, and 91.1% mAP@0.5, respectively, on three blood cell datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art object detectors, e.g., RT-DETR, YOLOv5, and YOLOv7. Our code is available at https://github.com/mkang315/CST-YOLO.