WGS-YOLO: A real-time object detector based on YOLO framework for autonomous driving

The safety and reliability of autonomous driving depends on the precision and efficiency of object detection systems. In this paper, a refined adaptation of the YOLO architecture (WGS-YOLO) is developed to improve the detection of pedestrians and vehicles. Specifically, its information fusion is enhanced by incorporating the Weighted Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (W-ELAN) module, an innovative dynamic weighted feature fusion module using channel shuffling. Meanwhile, the computational demands and parameters of the proposed WGS-YOLO are significantly reduced by employing the Space-to-Depth Convolution (SPD-Conv) and the Grouped Spatial Pyramid Pooling (GSPP) modules that have been strategically designed. The performance of our model is evaluated with the BDD100k and DAIR-V2X-V datasets. In terms of mean Average Precision (${\text{mAP}}_{0.5}$), the proposed model outperforms the baseline Yolov7 by 12%. Furthermore, extensive experiments are conducted to verify our analysis and the model’s robustness across diverse scenarios.