Road scene pedestrian detection based on detection-enhanced YOLOv3-tiny

To provide drivers with real-time and accurate pedestrian information and reduce traffic accidents, the detection of enhanced YOLOv3-tiny（DOEYT） pedestrian detection algorithm was proposed. The robust feature extraction network was established, and the asymmetric max-pooling was used for down sampling to prevent the loss of lateral pedestrian features due to the increased receptive field. Hardswish was employed as activation function for the convolutional layers to optimize network performance, and the global context（GC） self-attention mechanism was used to capture holistic feature information. In the classification and regression network, the three-scale detection strategy was adopted to improve the accuracy of small-scale pedestrian target detection. The k-means++ algorithm was used to regenerate dataset anchor boxes for enhancing network convergence speed. The pedestrian detection dataset was constructed and divided into training and testing sets to evaluate DOEYT performance. The results show that by the asymmetric max-pooling, Hardswish function and GC self-attention mechanism, AP values are increased by 14.4%, 7.9% and 10.8%, respectively. On the testing set, DOEYT achieves average precision of 91.2% and detection speed of 103 frames per second, which demonstrates that the proposed algorithm can quickly and accurately detect pedestrians for reducing the risk of traffic accidents.