Embedded YOLO: A Real-Time Object Detector for Small Intelligent Trajectory Cars

YOLO-Tiny is a lightweight version of the object detection model based on the original “You only look once†(YOLO) model for simplifying network structure and reducing parameters, which makes it suitable for real-time applications. Although the YOLO-Tiny series, which includes YOLOv3-Tiny and YOLOv4-Tiny, can achieve real-time performance on a powerful GPU, it remains challenging to leverage this approach for real-time object detection on embedded computing devices, such as those in small intelligent trajectory cars. To obtain real-time and high-accuracy performance on these embedded devices, a novel object detection lightweight network called embedded YOLO is proposed in this paper. First, a new backbone network structure, ASU-SPP network, is proposed to enhance the effectiveness of low-level features. Then, we designed a simplified version of the neck network module PANet-Tiny that reduces computation complexity. Finally, in the detection head module, we use depthwise separable convolution to reduce the number of convolution stacks. In addition, the number of channels is reduced to 96 dimensions so that the module can attain the parallel acceleration of most inference frameworks. With its lightweight design, the proposed embedded YOLO model has only 3.53M parameters, and the average processing time can reach 155.1 frames per second, as verified by Baidu smart car target detection. At the same time, compared with YOLOv3-Tiny and YOLOv4-Tiny, the detection accuracy is 6% higher.