Research on pedestrian detection based on multi-level fine-grained YOLOX algorithm

PurposeThe purpose of the study is to address the problems of low accuracy and missed detection of occluded pedestrians and small target pedestrians when using the YOLOX general object detection algorithm for pedestrian detection. This study proposes a multi-level fine-grained YOLOX pedestrian detection algorithm.Design/methodology/approachFirst, to address the problem of the original YOLOX algorithm in obtaining a single perceptual field for the feature map before feature fusion, this study improves the PAFPN structure by adding the ResCoT module to increase the diversity of the perceptual field of the feature map and divides the pedestrian multi-scale features into finer granularity. Second, for the CSPLayer of the PAFPN, a weight gain-based normalization-based attention module (NAM) is proposed to make the model pay more attention to the context information when extracting pedestrian features and highlight the salient features of pedestrians. Finally, the authors experimentally determined the optimal values for the confidence loss function.FindingsThe experimental results show that, compared with the original YOLOX algorithm, the AP of the improved algorithm increased by 2.90%, the Recall increased by 3.57%, and F1 increased by 2% on the pedestrian dataset.Research limitations/implicationsThe multi-level fine-grained YOLOX pedestrian detection algorithm can effectively improve the detection of occluded pedestrians and small target pedestrians.Originality/valueThe authors introduce a multi-level fine-grained ResCoT module and a weight gain-based NAM attention module.