An Improved Pedestrian Detection Model Based on YOLOv8 for Dense Scenes

In dense scenes, pedestrians often exhibit a variety of symmetrical features, such as symmetry in body contour, posture, clothing, and appearance. However, pedestrian detection poses challenges due to the mutual occlusion of pedestrians and the small scale of distant pedestrians in the image. To address these challenges, we propose a pedestrian detection algorithm tailored for dense scenarios called YOLO-RAD. In this algorithm, we integrate the concept of receiving field attention (RFA) into the Conv and C2f modules to enhance the feature extraction capability of the network. A self-designed four-layer adaptive spatial feature fusion (ASFF) module is introduced, and shallow pedestrian feature information is added to enhance the multi-scale feature fusion capability. Finally, we introduce a small-target dynamic head structure (DyHead-S) to enhance the capability of detecting small-scale pedestrians. Experimental results on WiderPerson and CrowdHuman, two challenging dense pedestrian datasets, show that compared with YOLOv8n, our YOLO-RAD algorithm has achieved significant improvement in detection performance, and the detection performance of mAP@0.5 has increased by 2.5% and 6%, respectively. The detection performance of mAP@0.5:0.95 was improved by 2.7% and 6.8%, respectively. Therefore, the algorithm can effectively improve the performance of pedestrian detection in dense scenes.