RMP-YOLO: Robust Multi-Scale Pedestrian Detection for Dense Scenarios

With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving in modern society, dense pedestrian detection technology has encountered performance bottlenecks. To address this, we propose a robust and lightweight pedestrian detection algorithm, RMP-YOLO, designed to efficiently detect small, occluded, and low-light objects. Firstly, RFAConv is utilized as the core component of the backbone network, combining standard convolution with attention mechanisms and using group convolution to extract features from the spatial receptive field. Secondly, MobileViTv3 is introduced into the backbone to combine CNNs with Transformers. The model is further enhanced by adjusting feature fusion, introducing residual connections, and optimizing local representation with deep convolutional layers. Finally, the PIoUv2 loss function is employed for bounding-box regression, significantly reducing detection errors for small-scale pedestrians in crowded environments. Experimental results demonstrate that RMP-YOLO improves mAP@0.5 by 1.3% on a custom dataset and 0.91% on the WiderPerson dataset. Crucially, it maintains high efficiency with only 3.71 million parameters and 6.29 GFLOPs, meeting the deployment requirements for low computational power and high precision.