Abstract:

Traditional worker helmet wearing detection models commonly used at construction sites suffer from long processing times and high hardware requirements; the limited number of available training data sets for complex and changing environments, moreover, contributes to poor model robustness. In this paper, we propose a lightweight helmet wearing detection model—named YOLO-S—to address these challenges. First, for the case of unbalanced data set categories, a hybrid scene data augmentation method is used to balance the categories and improve the robustness of the model for complex construction environments; the original YOLOv5s backbone network is changed to MobileNetV2, which reduces the network computational complexity. Second, the model is compressed, and a scaling factor is introduced in the BN layer for sparse training. The importance of each channel is judged, redundant channels are pruned, and the volume of model inference calculations is further reduced; these changes help increase the overall model detection speed. Finally, YOLO-S is achieved by fine-tuning the auxiliary model for knowledge distillation. The experimental results show that the recall rate of YOLO-S is increased by 1.9% compared with YOLOv5s, the mAP of YOLO-S is increased by 1.4% compared with YOLOv5s, the model parameter is compressed to 1/3 of YOLOv5s, the model volume is compressed to 1/4 of YOLOv5s, FLOPs are compressed to 1/3 of YOLOv5s, the reasoning speed is faster than other models, and the portability is higher.

Key words: helmet-wearing detection, data augmentation, model compression, knowledge distillation