A Smart Classroom Behavior Analysis Framework with a New Highly Congested Classroom Dataset

Student behavior detection is important for intelligent classroom analysis but remains challenging in large-class scenarios due to dense instance co-occurrence, asymmetric occlusion, depth-wise scale variation, and fine-grained semantic degradation in distant targets. Existing classroom behavior datasets and general-purpose detectors are insufficient to characterize and address these challenges. This paper constructs the Highly Congested Classroom Behavior (HCCB) dataset, containing 50,229 student behavior instances across seven categories: reading, writing, heads up, sleeping, looking around, bowing head, and using phone. HCCB provides a challenging benchmark that integrates dense distributions, severe occlusion, scale variation, and fine-grained behavioral semantics. To address these issues, we propose ODER-HSFNet, a YOLO-based detection framework tailored to highly crowded classrooms. At its core, ODER-HSFNet introduces three task-specific innovations: the Occlusion-aware Deformable Edge Rectifier (ODER), which strengthens boundary evidence under occlusion; the Hypergraph-State Spatial Fusion (HSSF) module, which integrates local structure enhancement, state-space contextual modeling, and high-order relation aggregation; and the Occlusion-Calibrated Detection Head (OCDetect), which suppresses low-quality Pre-NMS candidates and reduces false positives from occlusion boundaries and neighboring instances. Experiments on two classroom behavior detection datasets show that ODER-HSFNet outperforms mainstream YOLO-series methods, achieving 60.60%/80.12% mAP50:95/mAP50 on HCCB and 57.36%/74.65% on SCB-D3-S. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of the proposed design for highly crowded classroom behavior detection.