FA-YOLO: A Pedestrian Detection Algorithm with Feature Enhancement and Adaptive Sparse Self-Attention

Pedestrian detection technology refers to identifying pedestrians within the field of view and is widely used in smart cities, public safety surveillance, and other scenarios. However, in real-world complex scenes, challenges such as high pedestrian density, occlusion, and low lighting conditions lead to blurred image boundaries, which significantly impact accuracy of pedestrian detection. To address these challenges, we propose a novel pedestrian detection algorithm, FA-YOLO. First, to address issues of limited effective information extraction in backbone network and insufficient feature map representation, we propose a feature enhancement module (FEM) that integrates both global and local features of the feature map, thereby enhancing the network’s feature representation capability. Then, to reduce redundant information and improve adaptability to complex scenes, an adaptive sparse self-attention (ASSA) module is designed to suppress noise interactions in irrelevant regions and eliminate feature redundancy across both spatial and channel dimensions. Finally, to further enhance the model’s focus on target features, we propose cross stage partial with adaptive sparse self-attention (C3ASSA), which improves overall detection performance by reinforcing the importance of target features during the final detection stage. Additionally, a scalable intersection over union (SIoU) loss function is introduced to address the vector angle differences between predicted and ground-truth bounding boxes. Extensive experiments on the WiderPerson and RTTS datasets demonstrate that FA-YOLO achieves State-of-the-Art performance, with a precision improvement of 3.5% on the WiderPerson and 3.0% on RTTS compared to YOLOv11.