DPDN-YOLOv8: A Method for Dense Pedestrian Detection in Complex Environments

Accurate pedestrian detection from a robotic perspective has become increasingly critical, especially in complex environments such as crowded and high-density populations. Existing methods have low accuracy due to multi-scale pedestrians and dense occlusion in complex environments. To address the above drawbacks, a dense pedestrian detection network architecture based on YOLOv8n (DPDN-YOLOv8) was introduced for complex environments. The network aims to improve robots’ pedestrian detection in complex environments. Firstly, the C2f modules in the backbone network are replaced with C2f_ODConv modules integrating omni-dimensional dynamic convolution (ODConv) to enable the model’s multi-dimensional feature focusing on detected targets. Secondly, the up-sampling operator Content-Aware Reassembly of Features (CARAFE) is presented to replace the Up-Sample module to reduce the loss of the up-sampling information. Then, the Adaptive Spatial Feature Fusion detector head with four detector heads (ASFF-4) was introduced to enhance the system’s ability to detect small targets. Finally, to accelerate the convergence of the network, the Focaler-Shape-IoU is utilized to become the bounding box regression loss function. The experimental results show that, compared with YOLOv8n, the [email protected] of DPDN-YOLOv8 increases from 80.5% to 85.6%. Although model parameters increase from 3×106 to 5.2×106, it can still meet requirements for deployment on mobile devices.