HF-YOLO: Advanced Pedestrian Detection Model with Feature Fusion and Imbalance Resolution

Abstract Pedestrian detection is crucial for various applications, including intelligent transportation and video surveillance systems. Although recent research has advanced pedestrian detection models like the YOLO series, they still face limitations in handling diverse pedestrian scales, leading to performance challenges. To address these issues, we propose HF-YOLO, an advanced pedestrian detection model. HF-YOLO tackles the complexities of pedestrian detection in complex scenes by addressing scale variations and occlusions among pedestrians. In the feature fusion stage, our algorithm leverages both shallow localization information and deep semantic information. This involves fusing P2 layer features and adding a high-resolution detection layer, significantly improving the detection of small-scale pedestrians and occluded instances. To enhance feature representation, HF-YOLO incorporates the HardSwish activation function, introducing more non-linear factors and strengthening the model’s ability to represent complex and discriminative features. Additionally, to address regression imbalance, a balance factor is introduced to the CIoU loss function. This modification effectively resolves the imbalance problem and enhances pedestrian localization accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. HF-YOLO achieves notable improvements, including a 3.52% increase in average precision, a 1.35% boost in accuracy, and a 4.83% enhancement in recall. Moreover, the algorithm maintains real-time performance with a detection time of 8.5ms, meeting the stringent requirements of real-time applications.