Pedestrian detection for complex scenes suffers from pedestrian occlusion issues, such as occlusions between pedestrians. As well-known, compared with the variability of the human body, the shape of a human head and their shoulders changes minimally and has high stability. Therefore, head detection is an important research area in the field of pedestrian detection. The translational invariance of neural network enables us to design a deep convolutional neural network, which means that, even if the appearance and location of the target changes, it can still be recognized effectively. However, the problems of scale invariance and high miss detection rates for small targets still exist. In this paper, a feature extraction network DR-Net based on Darknet-53 is proposed to improve the information transmission rate between convolutional layers and to extract more semantic information. In addition, the MDC (mixed dilated convolution) with different sampling rates of dilated convolution is embedded to improve the detection rate of small targets. We evaluated our method on three publicly available datasets and achieved excellent results. The AP (Average Precision) value on the Brainwash dataset, HollywoodHeads dataset, and SCUT-HEAD dataset reached 92.1%, 84.8%, and 90% respectively.
Head Detection Based on DR Feature Extraction Network and Mixed Dilated Convolution Module