PV-YOLO: A lightweight pedestrian and vehicle detection model based on improved YOLOv8

With the frequent occurrence of urban traffic accidents, fast and accurate detection of pedestrian and vehicle targets has become one of the key technologies for intelligent assisted driving systems. To meet the efficiency and lightweight requirements of smart devices, this paper proposes a lightweight pedestrian and vehicle detection model based on the YOLOv8n model, named PV-YOLO. In the proposed model, receptive-field attention convolution (RFAConv) serves as the backbone network because of its target feature extraction ability, and the neck utilizes the bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) instead of the original path aggregation network (PANet) to simplify the feature fusion process. Moreover, a lightweight detection head is introduced to reduce the computational burden and improve the overall detection accuracy. In addition, a small target detection layer is designed to improve the accuracy for small distant targets. Finally, to reduce the computational burden further, the lightweight C2f module is utilized to compress the model. The experimental results on the BDD100K and KITTI datasets demonstrate that the proposed PV-YOLO can achieve higher detection accuracy than YOLOv8n and other baseline methods with less model complexity.