A Real‐Time Object Detector for Autonomous Vehicles Based on YOLOv4

Object detection is an important part of autonomous driving technology. To ensure the safe running of vehicles at high speed, real-time and accurate detection of all the objects on the road is required. How to balance the speed and accuracy of detection is a hot research topic in recent years. This paper puts forward a one-stage object detection algorithm based on YOLOv4, which improves the detection accuracy and supports real-time operation. The backbone of the algorithm doubles the stacking times of the last residual block of CSPDarkNet53. The neck of the algorithm replaces the SPP with the RFB structure, improves the PAN structure of the feature fusion module, adds the attention mechanism CBAM and CA structure to the backbone and neck structure, and finally reduces the overall width of the network to the original 3/4, so as to reduce the model parameters and improve the inference speed. Compared with YOLOv4, the algorithm in this paper improves the average accuracy on KITTI dataset by 2.06% and BDD dataset by 2.95%. When the detection accuracy is almost unchanged, the inference speed of this algorithm is increased by 9.14%, and it can detect in real time at a speed of more than 58.47 FPS.