YOLOv7-DSE: An Efficient Safety Equipment Detection Network.

Safety equipment detection is an important application of object detection, receiving widespread attention in fields such as smart construction sites and video surveillance. Significant progress has been made in object detection due to the rapid development of deep learning. Multi-scale targets and complex scenes increase the likelihood of false positives and missed detections, which can affect the accuracy of the detection. To address this issue, this study proposes YOLOv7-DSE. It is a small complex target scene detection network based on the improved YOLOv7. Also, we have created a private dataset of safety equipment. First, we enhanced the ELAN and MP backbone networks. Backbone is replaced by ordinary convolution by the depthwise separable convolution. We enabled the backbone network to extract deeper image features without increasing the amount of parameters and computation. Simultaneously, the model incorporates the EIOU loss function to improve its convergence speed and positioning effect. Secondly, we propose a new ELAN-SPD structure in the head network. Based on the ELAN structure, a space-to-depth convolutional layer is added to fully downsample the feature map, preserving all learnable features. Our network model can better detect objects with significant size differences faced with complex scenes. YOLOv7-DSE achieved the mAP of 82.38%, surpassing the original YOLOv7 with 2.64%. The YOLOv7-DSE model has a minor size compared to the baseline model. Our improvement has reduced the model parameters by 22.4%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]