Attention-based digital filter with anchor-free feature pyramid learning model for pedestrian detection

Abstract

Ensuring real-time performance while leveraging pedestrian detection is a crucial prerequisite for intelligent driving technology. The development of lightweight models with good detection accuracy is also crucial. This work proposes a novel method, the Attention Digital Filter with Anchor-Free Feature Pyramid Learning Model (ADFAFPLM), to meet these needs. The suggested method consists of combining two networks: one is a digital filter based on an attention network that eliminates noise and other picture distortions. The attention-based residual network digital filters are chosen for their enhanced filtering performance, adaptability, efficient learning through residual connections, noise suppression, interpretability, and generalization capabilities. Next, from the input crowded and occluded photos, the pedestrian is identified using an anchor-free feature pyramid network. The Eurocity person dataset was used to train the model, and it was also tested on other datasets like CityPersons, INRIA, PennFudan, and Eurocity. The investigation was expanded to include images in hazy, noisy, and occlusion environments, among other environmental conditions. The image resolutions were also considered for analysis and it was observed that with increasing image resolution, the mAP increases. Based on the ablation study, the ADF-AFPLM adopted YOLOv8n with batch size 16, and image size 640 is considered for efficient result with different testing datasets. The model achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of approx. 87% and shows its efficacy over state-of-art models.