A High-Precision Vehicle Detection and Tracking Method Based on the Attention Mechanism

Vehicle detection and tracking technology plays an important role in intelligent transportation management and control systems. This paper proposes a novel vehicle detection and tracking method for small target vehicles to achieve high detection and tracking accuracy based on the attention mechanism. We first develop a new vehicle detection model (YOLOv5-NAM) by adding the normalization-based attention module (NAM) to the classical YOLOv5s model. By exploiting the YOLOv5-NAM model as the vehicle detector, we then propose a real-time small target vehicle tracking method (JDE-YN), where the feature extraction process is embedded in the prediction head for joint training. Finally, we present extensive experimental results to verify our method on the UA-DETRAC dataset and to demonstrate that the method can effectively detect small target vehicles in real time. It is shown that compared with the original YOLOv5s model, the mAP value of the YOLOv5-NAM vehicle detection model is improved by 1.6%, while the MOTA value of the JDE-YN method improved by 0.9% compared with the original JDE method.