Small Object Detection in Traffic Scenes Based on Attention Feature Fusion

There are many small objects in traffic scenes, but due to their low resolution and limited information, their detection is still a challenge. Small object detection is very important for the understanding of traffic scene environments. To improve the detection accuracy of small objects in traffic scenes, we propose a small object detection method in traffic scenes based on attention feature fusion. First, a multi-scale channel attention block (MS-CAB) is designed, which uses local and global scales to aggregate the effective information of the feature maps. Based on this block, an attention feature fusion block (AFFB) is proposed, which can better integrate contextual information from different layers. Finally, the AFFB is used to replace the linear fusion module in the object detection network and obtain the final network structure. The experimental results show that, compared to the benchmark model YOLOv5s, this method has achieved a higher mean Average Precison (mAP) under the premise of ensuring real-time performance. It increases the mAP of all objects by 0.9 percentage points on the validation set of the traffic scene dataset BDD100K, and at the same time, increases the mAP of small objects by 3.5%.