PFEL-Net: A lightweight network to enhance feature for multi-scale pedestrian detection

In the context of intelligent community research, pedestrian detection is an important and challenging object detection task. The diversity in pedestrian target scales and the interference from the surrounding background can result in incorrect and missed detections by the detector, while a large algorithm model can pose challenges for deploying the detector. In response to these issues, this work presents a pedestrian feature enhancement lightweight network (PFEL-Net), which provides the possibility for edge computing and accurate detection of multi-scale pedestrian targets in complex scenes. Firstly, a parallel dilated residual module is designed to expand the receptive field for obtaining richer pedestrian features; then, the selective bidirectional diffusion pyramid network is devised to finely fuse features, and a detail feature layer captures multi-scale information; after that, the lightweight shared detection head is constructed to lightweight the model head; finally, the channel pruning algorithm is employed to further reduce the computational complexity and size of the improved model without compromising accuracy. On the CityPersons dataset, compared to YOLOv8, PFEL-Net increases the \( mA{P}_{50} \) and \( mA{P}_{50:95} \) by 6.3% and 4.9%, respectively, reduces the number of model parameters by 89% and compresses the model size by 85%, resulting in a mere 0.9 MB. Similarly, excellent performance is achieved on the TinyPerson dataset. The source code is available at https://github.com/1tangbao/PFEL.