DMFFNet: Dual-Mode Multi-Scale Feature Fusion-Based Pedestrian Detection Method

Most contemporary pedestrian detection algorithms are based on visible light image detection. However, in environments with dim light, small targets, and easily occluded and cluttered backgrounds, single-mode visible light images relying on color, texture, and other features cannot adequately represent the feature information of targets; as a result, a large number of targets are lost and the algorithm performance is not good. To address this problem, we propose a dual-modal multi-scale feature fusion network (DMFFNet). First, we use the MobileNet v3 backbone network to extract the features of dual-modal images as input for the multi-scale fusion attention (MFA) module, combining the idea of multi-scale feature fusion and attention mechanism. Second, we deeply fuse the multi-scale features output by the MFA with the double deep feature fusion (DDFF) module to enhance the semantic and geometric information of the target. Finally, we optimize the loss function to reflect the distance between the predicted box and the real box more realistically as well as to enhance the ability of the network toward predicting difficult samples. We performed multi-directional evaluations on the KAIST dual-light pedestrian dataset and the visible-thermal infrared pedestrian dataset (VTI) in our laboratory through comparative and ablation experiments. The overall MR-2 on the KAIST dual-light pedestrian dataset is 9.26%, and the MR-2 in dim light, partial occlusion, and severe occlusion are 5.17%, 23.35%, and 47.31%, respectively. The overall MR-2 on the VIT dual-light pedestrian dataset is 9.26%, and the MR-2 in dim light, partial occlusion, and severe occlusion are 5.17%, 23.35%, and 47.31%, respectively. The results show that the algorithm performs well on pedestrian detection, especially in dim light and when the target was occluded.