Data-Driven Based Tiny-YOLOv3 Method for Front Vehicle Detection Inducing SPP-Net

In order to solve the problem of low recognition rate and low real-time performance of vehicle detection in complex road environment, a data-driven forward vehicle detection algorithm based on improved tiny-YOLOv3 is proposed. Based on tiny-YOLOv3, the context feature information is combined to increase the two scale detections of tiny-YOLOv3 to three. The spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) module is added to increase the number of feature channels to improve the network feature extraction ability. According to the dense arrangement of vehicles on the horizontal axis in the road image ahead, we change the grid size of tiny-YOLOv3 and increase the number of candidate boxes on the horizontal axis. In addition, combined with the characteristics of the vehicle size in the road image ahead, K-means clustering method is used to select the appropriate number and size of target candidate boxes. We obtain the optimal detection model by multi-scale training of the improved network. The experimental results show that the average accuracy of the improved algorithm on the KITTI datasets is 91.03%, which is 7.12% higher than that of tiny-YOLOv3. And the detection speed of improved network is 144 frames/s, which meets the real-time requirements.