Occluded Pedestrian Detection Techniques by Deformable Attention-Guided Network (DAGN)

Although many deep-learning-based methods have achieved considerable detection performance for pedestrians with high visibility, their overall performances are still far from satisfactory, especially when heavily occluded instances are included. In this research, we have developed a novel pedestrian detector using a deformable attention-guided network (DAGN). Considering that pedestrians may be deformed with occlusions or under diverse poses, we have designed a deformable convolution with an attention module (DCAM) to sample from non-rigid locations, and obtained the attention feature map by aggregating global context information. Furthermore, the loss function was optimized to get accurate detection bounding boxes, by adopting complete-IoU loss for regression, and the distance IoU-NMS was used to refine the predicted boxes. Finally, a preprocessing technique based on tone mapping was applied to cope with the low visibility cases due to poor illumination. Extensive evaluations were conducted on three popular traffic datasets. Our method could decrease the log-average miss rate (MR-2) by 12.44% and 7.8%, respectively, for the heavy occlusion and overall cases, when compared to the published state-of-the-art results of the Caltech pedestrian dataset. Of the CityPersons and EuroCity Persons datasets, our proposed method outperformed the current best results by about 5% in MR-2 for the heavy occlusion cases.

Automated summary

A novel pedestrian detector using deformable attention-guided network (DAGN) was developed in this research, featuring a deformable convolution with an attention module (DCAM) and optimized loss function. Extensive evaluations on multiple datasets showed promising detection performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.