Citation

Shi J, Sun D, Kieu M, Guo B, Gao M. Sensors (Basel) 2023; 24(1).

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s24010059

PMID

38202921

PMCID

PMC10780687

Abstract

The precise and real-time detection of vulnerable road users (VRUs) using infrastructure-sensors-enabled devices is crucial for the advancement of intelligent traffic monitoring systems. To overcome the prevalent inefficiencies in VRU detection, this paper introduces an enhanced detector that utilizes a lightweight backbone network integrated with a parameterless attention mechanism. This integration significantly enhances the feature extraction capability for small targets within high-resolution images. Additionally, the design features a streamlined 'neck' and a dynamic detection head, both augmented with a pruning algorithm to reduce the model's parameter count and ensure a compact architecture. In collaboration with the specialized engineering dataset De_VRU, the model was deployed on the Hisilicon_Hi3516DV300 platform, specifically designed for infrastructure units. Rigorous ablation studies, employing YOLOv7-tiny as the baseline, confirm the detector's efficacy on the BDD100K and LLVIP datasets. The model not only achieved an improvement of over 12% in the mAP@50 metric but also realized a reduction in parameter count by more than 40%, and a 50% decrease in inference time. Visualization outcomes and a case study illustrate the detector's proficiency in conducting real-time detection with high-resolution imagery, underscoring its practical applicability.

Language: en

Keywords

infrastructure-sensors-enabled engineering; model lightweight; object detection; VRU detection