A Thermal Infrared Pedestrian-Detection Method for Edge Computing Devices

The thermal imaging pedestrian-detection system has excellent performance in different lighting scenarios, but there are problems regarding weak texture, object occlusion, and small objects. Meanwhile, large high-performance models have higher latency on edge devices with limited computing power. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose a real-time thermal imaging pedestrian-detection method for edge computing devices. Firstly, we utilize multi-scale mosaic data augmentation to enhance the diversity and texture of objects, which alleviates the impact of complex environments. Then, the parameter-free attention mechanism is introduced into the network to enhance features, which barely increases the computing cost of the network. Finally, we accelerate multi-channel video detection through quantization and multi-threading techniques on edge computing devices. Additionally, we create a high-quality thermal infrared dataset to facilitate the research. The comparative experiments on the self-built dataset, YDTIP, and three public datasets, with other methods show that our method also has certain advantages.