Anchor free multispectral pedestrian detection algorithm based on differential feature attention mechanism

Multispectral pedestrian detection system suffers with low feature fusion quality, high quantity of model hyper-parameters and complex anchor matching algorithm.To deal with these problems, an anchor free multispectral pedestrian detection algorithm based on differential feature attention mechanism was proposed.Firstly, differential modality aware fusion was used to obtain the complementary information between different modalities to optimize the channel features.Secondly, the CenterNet detection framework with anchor free mechanism was adopted to greatly reduce the computational complexity of the model and thus improve the detection speed.Finally, differential feature guided attention mechanism was introduced to improve the quality of feature fusion and further enhance the detection accuracy.Experimental results on three open datasets, KAIST, CVC14 and FLIR, show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the detection accuracy and speed compared with the current advanced methods, and has a good practical application prospect.