An Improved YOLOv7 Lightweight Detection Algorithm for Obscured Pedestrians

The detection algorithm commonly misses obscured pedestrians in traffic scenes with a high pedestrian density because mutual occlusion among pedestrians reduces the prediction box score of the concealed pedestrians. The paper uses the YOLOv7 algorithm as the baseline and makes the following three improvements by investigating the variables influencing the detection method’s performance: First, the backbone network of the YOLOv7 algorithm is replaced with the lightweight feature extraction network Mobilenetv3 since the pedestrian detection algorithm frequently needs to be deployed in driverless mobile, which requires a fast operating speed of the algorithm; second, a high-resolution feature pyramid structure is suggested for the issue of missed detection of hidden pedestrians, which upscales the feature maps generated from the feature pyramid to increase the resolution of the output feature maps and introduces shallow feature maps to strengthen the distinctions between adjacent sub-features to enhance the network’s ability to extract features for the visible area of hidden pedestrians and small-sized pedestrians in order to produce deeper features with greater differentiation for pedestrians; and the third is to suggest a detection head based on an attention mechanism that is employed to lower the confidence level of target neighboring sub-features, lower the quantity of redundant detection boxes, and lower the following NMS computation. The mAP of the suggested approach in this work achieves 89.75%, which is 9.5 percentage points better than the YOLOv7 detection algorithm, according to experiments on the CrowdHuman pedestrian-intensive dataset. The algorithm proposed in this paper can considerably increase the detection performance of the detection algorithm, particularly for obscured pedestrians and small-sized pedestrians in the dataset, according to the experimental effect plots.