Transfer Learning-Based YOLOv3 Model for Road Dense Object Detection

Stemming from the overlap of objects and undertraining due to few samples, road dense object detection is confronted with poor object identification performance and the inability to recognize edge objects. Based on this, one transfer learning-based YOLOv3 approach for identifying dense objects on the road has been proposed. Firstly, the Darknet-53 network structure is adopted to obtain a pre-trained YOLOv3 model. Then, the transfer training is introduced as the output layer for the special dataset of 2000 images containing vehicles. In the proposed model, one random function is adapted to initialize and optimize the weights of the transfer training model, which is separately designed from the pre-trained YOLOv3. The object detection classifier replaces the fully connected layer, which further improves the detection effect. The reduced size of the network model can further reduce the training and detection time. As a result, it can be better applied to actual scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate that the object detection accuracy of the presented approach is 87.75% for the Pascal VOC 2007 dataset, which is superior to the traditional YOLOv3 and the YOLOv5 by 4% and 0.59%, respectively. Additionally, the test was carried out using UA-DETRAC, a public road vehicle detection dataset. The object detection accuracy of the presented approach reaches 79.23% in detecting images, which is 4.13% better than the traditional YOLOv3, and compared with the existing relatively new object detection algorithm YOLOv5, the detection accuracy is 1.36% better. Moreover, the detection speed of the proposed YOLOv3 method reaches 31.2 Fps/s in detecting images, which is 7.6 Fps/s faster than the traditional YOLOv3, and compared with the existing new object detection algorithm YOLOv7, the speed is 1.5 Fps/s faster. The proposed YOLOv3 performs 67.36 Bn of floating point operations per second in detecting video, which is obviously less than the traditional YOLOv3 and the newer object detection algorithm YOLOv5.