A Novel Object Recognition Algorithm Based on Improved YOLOv5 Model for Patient Care Robots

The rapid development of computer vision raises a new research area involving patient care robots. Such robotic systems require fast target recognition at long ranges, where detecting smaller objects is notoriously challenging due to the cameras’ low resolution and noise. Spurred by these concerns, this paper develops a novel object recognition algorithm that solves these problems. Specifically, we amend YOLOv5 with our proposed sparse detection algorithm aiming to improve detection efficiency by separating the most significant context features and constructing smaller and less computational expensive models. Furthermore, we extend FReLU and suggest a novel activation function to improve recognition accuracy, which presents an extended nonlinearity increasing the expressiveness of the activation function. Finally, we propose sine annealing, which affords a trajectory that tends to cross over barriers and escape from local minima during training phase, addressing the challenging small object detection problem. The experimental results highlight that our algorithm has a lower memory consumption (Mem) value than the traditional YOLOv5 with a 5% boost down. Additionally, our method runs twice as fast as the traditional YOLOv5 while preserving accuracy, achieving more than 14.5 FPS on a medium-capability CPU. Overall, the detection results prove that our method can faster and accurately classifies and localizes most small-scaled objects.