Fast vehicle detection algorithm based on lightweight YOLO7-tiny

The swift and precise detection of vehicles plays a significant role in intelligent transportation systems. Current vehicle detection algorithms encounter challenges of high computational complexity, low detection rate, and limited feasibility on mobile devices. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight vehicle detection algorithm based on YOLOv7-tiny (You Only Look Once version seven) called Ghost-YOLOv7. The width of model is scaled to 0.5 and the standard convolution of the backbone network is replaced with Ghost convolution to achieve a lighter network and improve the detection speed; then a self-designed Ghost bi-directional feature pyramid network (Ghost-BiFPN) is embedded into the neck network to enhance feature extraction capability of the algorithm and enriches semantic information; and a Ghost Decouoled Head (GDH) is employed for accurate prediction of vehicle location and species; finally, a coordinate attention mechanism is introduced into the output layer to suppress environmental interference. The WIoU loss function is employed to further enhance the detection accuracy. Ablation experiments results on the PASCAL VOC dataset demonstrate that Ghost-YOLOv7 outperforms the original YOLOv7-tiny model. It achieving a 29.8% reduction in computation, 37.3% reduction in the number of parameters, 35.1% reduction in model weights, 1.1% higher mean average precision (mAP), the detection speed is higher 27FPS compared with the original algorithm. Ghost-YOLOv7 was also compared on KITTI and BIT-vehicle datasets as well, and the results show that this algorithm has the overall best performance.