Vehicle detection in varied weather conditions using enhanced deep YOLO with complex wavelet

Abstract Traffic congestion is prevalent in many major and medium-sized cities throughout different countries in contemporary society. In traffic images, various multi-sized vehicles are tightly clustered together and obstructed from one another. Identifying vehicles in such instances is crucial for urban traffic surveillance, safety monitoring, and legal concerns but it also presents major challenges. The remarkable detection accuracy and efficiency of deep learning-based systems have led to their recent and extensive use in vehicle identification. There are significant advanced YOLO models with different backbone architectures and frameworks developed for vehicle detection. Yet, the performance of YOLO variants are facing the challenges of handling false detection against occluded and densely sophisticated scenarios. The proposed model is developed to address such types of limitations, for example; dynamic illumination, noisy images, and scale sensitivity to improve the vehicle detection rate in different traffic scenarios and varying weather conditions. The proposed study employs an improved YOLOv4 to identify moving vehicles in different lighting conditions including daylight, cloudy, rainy, and night. For hybridization, three techniques are utilized such as the Multiscale Retinex, Dual tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT), and Pulse Coupled Neural Networks (PCNN). The DTCWT is employed for multiscale decomposition and to denoise the complex high frequency subband information, then the denoised subbands are reconstructed into a denoised image. The Multiscale retinex is utilized to reduce the halo artifacts on high-contrast edges and maintain the balance with dynamic range compression and color reproduction. The synchronizing pulse burst property of PCNN is used to detect the isolated noisy pixels and modify the detected noisy pixels. From the results it is worth noting that the developed model surpasses state-of-the-art methods in sunny, night, cloudy, and rainy modes. The proposed method using the DTCWT technique can detect the vehicles with mAP of 91.09% and 35FPS.