A Novel Effective Vehicle Detection Method Based on Swin Transformer in Hazy Scenes

Under bad weather, the ability of intelligent vehicles to perceive the environment accurately is an important research content in many practical applications such as smart cities and unmanned driving. In order to improve vehicle environment perception technology in real hazy scenes, we propose an effective detection algorithm based on Swin Transformer for hazy vehicle detection. This algorithm includes two aspects. First of all, for the aspect of the difficulty in extracting haze features with poor visibility, a dehazing network is designed to obtain high-quality haze-free output through encoding and decoding methods using Swin Transformer blocks. In addition, for the aspect of the difficulty of vehicle detection in hazy images, a new end-to-end vehicle detection model in hazy days is constructed by fusing the dehazing module and the Swin Transformer detection module. In the training stage, the self-made dataset Haze-Car is used, and the haze detection model parameters are initialized by using the dehazing model and Swin-T through transfer learning. Finally, the final haze detection model is obtained by fine tuning. Through the joint learning of dehazing and object detection and comparative experiments on the self-made real hazy image dataset, it can be seen that the detection performance of the model in real-world scenes is improved by 12.5%.