Development of a High-Precision and Lightweight Detector and Dataset for Construction-Related Vehicles

Effective vehicle detection plays a crucial role in various applications in cities, including traffic management, urban planning, vehicle transport, and surveillance systems. However, existing vehicle detection methods suffer from low recognition accuracy, high computational costs, and excessive par...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wenjin Liu, Shudong Zhang, Lijuan Zhou, Ning Luo, Min Xu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-12-01
Series:Electronics
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/12/24/4996
Description
Summary:Effective vehicle detection plays a crucial role in various applications in cities, including traffic management, urban planning, vehicle transport, and surveillance systems. However, existing vehicle detection methods suffer from low recognition accuracy, high computational costs, and excessive parameters. To address these challenges, this paper proposed a high-precision and lightweight detector along with a new dataset for construction-related vehicles. The dataset comprises 8425 images across 13 different categories of vehicles. The detector was based on a modified version of the You Only Look Once (YOLOv4) algorithm. DenseNet was utilized as the backbone to optimize feature transmission and reuse, thereby improving detection accuracy and reducing computational costs. Additionally, the detector employed depth-wise separable convolutions to optimize the model structure, specifically focusing on the lightweight neck and head components. Furthermore, H-swish was used to enhance non-linear feature extraction. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed detector achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 96.95% on the provided dataset, signifying a 4.03% improvement over the original YOLOv4. The computational cost and parameter count of the detector were 26.09GFLops and 16.08 MB, respectively. The proposed detector not only achieves lower computational costs but also provides higher detection when compared to YOLOv4 and other state-of-the-art detectors.
ISSN:2079-9292