A Lightweight Vehicle-Pedestrian Detection Algorithm Based on Attention Mechanism in Traffic Scenarios

Object detection is a critical technology of environmental perception for autonomous driving vehicle. The Convolutional Neural Network has gradually become a powerful tool in the field of vehicle detection because of its powerful ability of feature extraction. In aiming to reach the balance between speed and accuracy of detection in complex traffic scenarios, this paper proposes an improved lightweight and high-performance vehicle–pedestrian detection algorithm based on the YOLOv4. Firstly, the backbone network CSPDarknet53 is replaced by MobileNetv2 to reduce the number of parameters and raise the capability of feature extraction. Secondly, the method of multi-scale feature fusion is used to realize the information interaction among different feature layers. Finally, a coordinate attention mechanism is added to focus on the region of interest in the image by way of weight adjustment. The experimental results show that this improved model has a great performance in vehicle–pedestrian detection in traffic scenarios. Experimental results on PASCAL VOC datasets show that the improved model’s mAP is 85.79% and speed is 35FPS, which has an increase of 4.31% and 16.7% compared to YOLOv4. Furthermore, the improved YOLOv4 model maintains a great balance between detection accuracy and speed on different datasets, indicating that it can be applied to vehicle–pedestrian detection in traffic scenarios.