AOYOLO Algorithm Oriented Vehicle and Pedestrian Detection in Foggy Weather

In the context of complex foggy environments, the acquired images often suffer from low visibility, high noise, and loss of detailed information. The direct application of general object detection methods fails to achieve satisfactory results. To address these issues, this paper proposes a foggy object detection method based on YOLOv8n, named AOYOLO. The all-in-one dehazing network (AOD-Net), a lightweight defogging network, is employed for data augmentation. Additionally, the ResCNet module is introduced in the backbone to better extract features from low-illumination images. The GACSP module is proposed in the neck to capture multi-scale features and effectively utilize them, thereby generating discriminative features with different scales. The detection head is improved using WiseIoU, which enhances the accuracy of object localization. Experimental evaluations are conducted on the publicly available datasets annotated realworld task-driven testing set (RTTS) and synthetic foggy KITTI dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed AOYOLO algorithm outperforms the original YOLOv8n algorithm with an average mean average precision improvement of 3.3% and 4.6% on the RTTS and KITTI datasets, respectively. The AOYOLO method effectively enhances the performance of object detection in foggy scenes. Due to its improved performance and stronger robustness, this experimental model provides a new perspective for foggy object detection.