An Improved YOLOv7 tiny Algorithm for Vehicle and Pedestrian Detection with Occlusion in Autonomous Driving

Future transportation is advancing in the direction of intelligent transportation systems, where an essential part is vehicle and pedestrian detection. Due to the complex urban traffic environment, vehicles and pedestrians in road monitoring have different forms of occlusion problems, resulting in the missed detection of objects. We design an improved you only look once version 7 (YOLOv7) tiny algorithm for vehicle and pedestrian detection under occlusion, with the following four main improvements. In order to locate the object more accurately, 1 × 1 convolution and identity connection are added to the 3 × 3 convolution, and convolution reparameterization is used to enhance the inference speed of the network model. In view of the complex road background and more interference, the coordinate attention was added to the connection part of backbone and neck to enhance the network’s capacity to detect the object and lessen interference from other targets. At the same time, before being sent to the detection head, global attention mechanism is added to improve the accuracy of model detection by capturing three-dimensional features. Considering the issue of imbalanced training samples, we propose focal complete intersection over union (CIOU) loss instead of CIOU loss to become the bounding box regression loss, so that the regression process attention to high-quality anchor boxes. Experiments show that the improved YOLOv7 tiny algorithm achieves 82.2% map@0.5 in pattern analysis, statistical modelling and computational learning visual object classes dataset, which is 2.8% higher than before the improvement. The performance of map@0.5:0.95 is 5.2% better than the previous improvement. The proposed improved algorithm can availably to detect partial occlusion objects.