Long-Distance Person Detection Based on YOLOv7

In the research field of small object detection, most object detectors have been successfully used for pedestrian detection, face recognition, lost and found, and automatic driving, among other applications, and have achieved good results. However, when general object detectors encounter challenging low-resolution images from the TinyPerson dataset, they will produce undesirable detection results because of the dense occlusion between people and different body poses. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a tiny object detection method TOD-YOLOv7 based on YOLOv7.First, this paper presents a reconstruction of the YOLOv7 network by adding a tiny object detection layer to enhance its detection ability. Then, we use the recursive gated convolution module to realize the interaction with the higher-order space to accelerate the model initialization process and reduce the reasoning time. Secondly, this paper proposes the integration of a coordinate attention mechanism into the YOLOv7 feature extraction network to strengthen the pedestrian object information and weaken the background information.Additionally, we leverage data augmentation techniques to improve the representation learning of the algorithm. The results show that compared with the baseline model YOLOv7, the detection accuracy of this model on the TinyPerson dataset is improved from 7.1% to 9.5%, and the detection speed reaches 208 frames per second (FPS). The algorithm of this paper is shown to achieve better detection results for tiny object detection.