Research on Pedestrian Detection Model and Compression Technology for UAV Images

The large view angle and complex background of UAV images bring many difficulties to the detection of small pedestrian targets in images, which are easy to be detected incorrectly or missed. In addition, the object detection models based on deep learning are usually complex and the high computational resource consumption limits the application scenarios. For small pedestrian detection in UAV images, this paper proposes an improved YOLOv5 method to improve the detection ability of pedestrians by introducing a new small object feature detection layer in the feature fusion layer, and experiments show that the improved method can improve the average precision by 4.4%, which effectively improves the pedestrian detection effect. To address the problem of high computational resource consumption, the model is compressed using channel pruning technology to reduce the consumption of video memory and computing power in the inference process. Experiments show that the model can be compressed to 11.2 MB and the GFLOPs of the model are reduced by 11.9% compared with that before compression under the condition of constant inference accuracy, which is significant for the deployment and application of the model.