A Lightweight Network for Vehicle and Pedestrian Object Detection in Autonomous Driving Scenarios

With the rapid development of autonomous driving technology, traditional object detection algorithms often face challenges such as the trade-off between model parameters and recognition accuracy, insufficient detection accuracy, and slow detection speed when dealing with vehicle and pedestrian detection tasks in complex scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel lightweight real-time driving scene detection network, FEEP-YOLO. Based on the YOLOv8 algorithm, our network not only maintains high detection accuracy but also achieves faster training speed and fewer model parameters. FEEP-YOLO employs a lightweight network, Faster Net, to significantly reduce model parameters, thereby accelerating detection speed and better meeting real-time requirements. To further improve detection accuracy, we introduce an EMA attention module into the network and optimize the bounding box loss function, adopting the EIOU loss function to enhance target features and reduce background interference. Additionally, to detect small objects more accurately, we add feature layers rich in semantic information to the detection end. Experimental results demonstrate that FEEP-YOLO outperforms YOLOv8 in terms of both detection speed and accuracy on the KITTI and SODA datasets, while significantly reducing the number of model parameters and model size. FEEP-YOLO achieves high detection speed while improving detection accuracy and reducing computational resource consumption, meeting the practical application requirements under limited computing power, memory space and power consumption. The key contribution of FEEP-YOLO lies in its ability to balance accuracy speed, and efficiency, making it a robust solution for real-time autonomous driving applications in complex environments.