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Improved YOLOX for pedestrian detection in crowded scenes

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Abstract

In recent years, object detection in computer vision has developed rapidly. However, crowded pedestrian detection in object detection remains a challenging problem, especially in one-stage detectors where improved solutions are rare. In this paper, we propose a novel crowded pedestrian detection method called YOLO-CPD which works better than other one-stage models in crowded environments. Our method primarily enhances the ability of the one-stage detector to detect multiple overlapping objects in a single area. The core of our approach is to use boxes difference to adjust the IoU value of the Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) and to improve the Intersection over Union regression loss (IoU Loss), with an Optimised Score Module (OPSC). Compared to the baseline, YOLO-CPD can improve the Average Precision (AP) by a 5.04% increase, Recall by a 2.17% increase and the log-average Miss Rate (\(MR^{-2}\)) by a 5.12% reduction on the CrowdHuman dataset. In addition, YOLO-CPD also achieved good results in the WiderPerson dataset, demonstrating the strong generalisation capability of our proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Performance Analysis and Optimal Design of Networked Intelligent Systems under Multiple Communication Constraints (62173049) and supported by Collaboration and Optimization of Hybrid Multi-Intelligent Systems Based on Learning Algorithms (61772086), National Natural Science Foundation of China.

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Correspondence to Changxin Cai.

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Gao, F., Cai, C., Jia, R. et al. Improved YOLOX for pedestrian detection in crowded scenes. J Real-Time Image Proc 20, 24 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-023-01287-7

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