Research on a vehicle and pedestrian detection algorithm based on improved attention and feature fusion

With the widespread integration of deep learning in intelligent transportation and various industrial sectors, target detection technology is gradually becoming one of the key research areas. Accurately detecting road vehicles and pedestrians is of great significance for the development of autonomous driving technology. Road object detection faces problems such as complex backgrounds, significant scale changes, and occlusion. To accurately identify traffic targets in complex environments, this paper proposes a road target detection algorithm based on the enhanced YOLOv5s. This algorithm introduces the weighted enhanced polarization self attention (WEPSA) self-attention mechanism, which uses spatial attention and channel attention to strengthen the important features extracted by the feature extraction network and suppress insignificant background information. In the neck network, we designed a weighted feature fusion network (CBiFPN) to enhance neck feature representation and enrich semantic information. This strategic feature fusion not only boosts the algorithm's adaptability to intricate scenes, but also contributes to its robust performance. Then, the bounding box regression loss function uses EIoU to accelerate model convergence and reduce losses. Finally, a large number of experiments have shown that the improved YOLOv5s algorithm achieves mAP@0.5 scores of 92.8% and 53.5% on the open-source datasets KITTI and Cityscapes. On the self-built dataset, the mAP@0.5 reaches 88.7%, which is 1.7%, 3.8%, and 3.3% higher than YOLOv5s, respectively, ensuring real-time performance while improving detection accuracy. In addition, compared to the latest YOLOv7 and YOLOv8, the improved YOLOv5 shows good overall performance on the open-source datasets.