RD-YOLO: An Effective and Efficient Object Detector for Roadside Perception System

In recent years, intelligent driving technology based on vehicle–road cooperation has gradually become a research hotspot in the field of intelligent transportation. There are many studies regarding vehicle perception, but fewer studies regarding roadside perception. As sensors are installed at different heights, the roadside object scale varies violently, which burdens the optimization of networks. Moreover, there is a large amount of overlapping and occlusion in complex road environments, which leads to a great challenge of object distinction. To solve the two problems raised above, we propose RD-YOLO. Based on YOLOv5s, we reconstructed the feature fusion layer to increase effective feature extraction and improve the detection capability of small targets. Then, we replaced the original pyramid network with a generalized feature pyramid network (GFPN) to improve the adaptability of the network to different scale features. We also integrated a coordinate attention (CA) mechanism to find attention regions in scenarios with dense objects. Finally, we replaced the original Loss with Focal-EIOU Loss to improve the speed of the bounding box regression and the positioning accuracy of the anchor box. Compared to the YOLOv5s, the RD-YOLO improves the mean average precision (mAP) by 5.5% on the Rope3D dataset and 2.9% on the UA-DETRAC dataset. Meanwhile, by modifying the feature fusion layer, the weight of RD-YOLO is decreased by 55.9% while the detection speed is almost unchanged. Nevertheless, the proposed algorithm is capable of real-time detection at faster than 71.9 frames/s (FPS) and achieves higher accuracy than the previous approaches with a similar FPS.