A Detection Model of the Complex Dynamic Traffic Environment for Unmanned Vehicles

It has always been an important and arduous task to detect the complex dynamic traffic environment, especially for unmanned driving. Although the existing advanced detection models have reached the speed requirements for detection, the detection accuracy needs to be further elevated to improve the unmanned driving’s safety. How to balance the accuracy and speed of detecting the complex dynamic traffic environment is still the primary problem to be solved for unmanned vehicles. Therefore, this article proposes a detection model of the complex dynamic traffic environment for unmanned vehicles by following the framework idea of YOLOv3. Firstly, we regard MobileNetv3 as the backbone and replace the traditional convolution with the depthwise separable convolution in the whole model to reduce the number of parameters and calculations. Secondly, in enhanced feature fusion layers, we perform the multi-scale fusion of four feature maps by the compress-and-expand module, the SPP module, and the cross-layer bidirectional module of feature fusion to improve the locating accuracy and reduce false detections. Thirdly, we add an IoU loss to improve the accuracy of model regression. Then, we employ the improved clustering algorithm to re-cluster anchor boxes, reducing the time overhead while improving the clustering accuracy. Finally, we compare the proposed model with other advanced detection models in the processed BDD dataset and the KITTI dataset. We verify that the mAP of the proposed model improves notably without loss of detection speed, the number of parameters and calculations decreases dramatically, and the proposed model exhibits a more superior performance.