MCS-YOLO: A Multiscale Object Detection Method for Autonomous Driving Road Environment Recognition

Object detection and recognition of road scenes are crucial tasks of the autonomous driving environmental perception system. The low inference speed and accuracy in object detection models hinder the development of autonomous driving technology. Searching for improvement of detection accuracy and speed is still a challenging task. For solving these problems, we proposed an MCS-YOLO algorithm. Firstly, a coordinate attention module is inserted into the backbone to aggregate the feature map’s spatial coordinate and cross-channel information. Then, we designed a multiscale small object detection structure to improve the recognition sensitivity of dense small object. Finally, we applied the Swin Transformer structure to the CNN to enable the network to focus on contextual spatial information. Conducting ablation study on the autonomous driving dataset BDD100K, MCS-YOLO algorithm achieves a mean average precision of 53.6% and a recall rate of 48.3%, which are 4.3% and 3.9% better than the YOLOv5s algorithm respectively. In addition, it can achieve real-time detection speed of 55 frames per second in a real scene. The results show that the MCS-YOLO algorithm is effective and superior in the task of automatic driving object detection.