Abstract: In the driving scenario, due to the occlusion between pedestrians and their scale variations, detection model have low accuracy, high model parameters, and difficulty in deploying to mobile terminals. This paper proposes a lightweight real-time pedestrian detection model, LPD-YOLO, based on the YOLOv5s model. Firstly, in the feature extraction part, the original backbone network is replaced with MES Net (Mish-Enhanced Shuffle Net), and an attention module SA (Shuffle Attention) is embedded in the backbone network to enhance network feature extraction ability. Secondly, in the feature fusion part, the original PANet is improved by using the DS-ASFF structure to fully fuse feature maps of different sizes. Then, standard convolution is replaced with GS convolution in the feature- covergent network part without affecting accuracy, further reducing model parameters and computation. Finally, in the prediction part, the original loss function is improved by using the OTA label assignment strategy combined with α-IOU to accelerate model convergence. Experimental data show that compared with YOLOv5s, LPD-YOLO has 81.2% fewer parameters, 46.3% lower floating-point operation volume, 75.8% smaller model size, and 3.3% higher detection accuracy. The single image detection speed is 13.2 ms, which better meets the real-time detection requirements of dense pedestrians in driving scenarios.

Key words: pedestrian detection, lightweight network, YOLOv5s, attention mechanism