Contour Information-Guided Multi-Scale Feature Detection Method for Visible-Infrared Pedestrian Detection

Infrared pedestrian target detection is affected by factors such as the low resolution and contrast of infrared pedestrian images, as well as the complexity of the background and the presence of multiple targets occluding each other, resulting in indistinct target features. To address these issues, this paper proposes a method to enhance the accuracy of pedestrian target detection by employing contour information to guide multi-scale feature detection. This involves analyzing the shapes and edges of the targets in infrared images at different scales to more accurately identify and differentiate them from the background and other targets. First, we propose a preprocessing method to suppress background interference and extract color information from visible images. Second, we propose an information fusion residual block combining a U-shaped structure and residual connection to form a feature extraction network. Then, we propose an attention mechanism based on a contour information-guided approach to guide the network to extract the depth features of pedestrian targets. Finally, we use the clustering method of mIoU to generate anchor frame sizes applicable to the KAIST pedestrian dataset and propose a hybrid loss function to enhance the network’s adaptability to pedestrian targets. The extensive experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper outperforms other comparative algorithms in pedestrian detection, proving its superiority.