2021 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics and Computer Engineering (ICCECE 2021)
An Improved Detection Method of Human Target at
2021 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics and Computer Engineering (ICCECE) | 978-1-7281-8319-0/20/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICCECE51280.2021.9342056
Sea Based on Yolov3
D ongjin Li
aInstitute o f System s Engineering,
A cadem y o f M ilitary Sciences, PLA, B eijing, China
bTianjin U niversity, Tianjin, C hina
dongjindddj@ 163.com
W ang Jin
Institute o f System s Engineering
A cadem y o f M ilitary Sciences
Beijing, C hina
Jiang Feng
A I R esearch and D evelopm ent C enter
B eijing Institute o f control and electronic technology
B eijing, China
Abstract—In the mission of searching and rescuing, it is often
faced with the situation that the area to be searched is large and
the target to be searched is small. Combined with the object
detection technology, this paper proposes a method for searching
drowning people. At first, we make a dataset, which contains a
large number of human targets at sea. Then, we improve the
Yolov3 algorithm: In the feature extraction network, we use the
residual module with channel attention mechanism. In the feature
fusion network, we add a bottom-up structure to the FPN
structure. Moreover, in terms of loss function, we use the CIoU loss
function. Finally, on the settings of the anchor box, we use a linear
transformation method to deal with the anchor boxes generated by
clustering algorithm. The detection accuracy of the improved
algorithm for human targets at sea is 72.17%, which has a good
detection effect.
Keywords-deep learning; object detection; human target;
searching and rescuing; detection method.
I. In t r o d u c t io n
At present, in the searching and rescuing mission, it mainly
depends on human vision to search drowning people. However,
in the process of large-scale searching, the search efficiency and
accuracy are low due to the small size of human targets at sea.
In addition, the emotion and state of searchers will also affect
the efficiency and accuracy of searching, making it difficult to
find human targets quickly. With the development of computer
vision technology, the object detection technology has also
attracted much attention and has always been a hot research
topic. The application of this technology to the scene of
searching and rescuing can improve the efficiency of searching.
The Object detection methods are generally divided into two
types: traditional object detection methods and the object
detection methods based on deep learning. The representative
algorithms of traditional object detection methods include
Haar+SVM [1], HOG+SVM [2], Shapelet+AdaBoost [3], etc.
Traditional object detection methods need artificial designed
features, which have very strict requirements for practitioners.
978-1-7281-8319-0/21/531.00 ©2021 IEEE
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Liu Yu
M icroelectronics Institute
Tianjin U niversity
Tianjin, C hina
Rufei Z hang
A I R esearch and D evelopm ent C enter
B eijing Institute o f control and electronic technology
Beijing, China
N iu Fu*
Institute o f System s Engineering
A cadem y o f M ilitary Sciences
Beijing, China
niufu@ vip.sina.com
The object detection methods based on deep learning can
automatically extract features through convolutional neural
network, and the semantic information of these features is more
abundant. It is not easily affected in a complex environment,
and has better robustness and higher accuracy. The object
detection methods based on deep learning can be divided into
the two-stage detection algorithm and the one-stage detection
algorithm. The representative algorithms of the two-stage
detection algorithm include R-CNN [4], F ast R-CNN [5], F aster
R-CNN [6 ], etc. At first, this type of algorithm extracts the
candidate regions roughly, and generates regions where the
target may exist. Then, these regions are extracted finely to
generate the final location and classification. accuracy has high
accuracy, but the detection speed is slow. The one-stage
detection algorithm directly obtains the location and category
information of the final target from the input image. The
representative algorithms of the one-stage detection algorithm
include YOLO [7], SSD [8 ], etc. This type of algorithm has
faster detection speed, but the accuracy is poorer than the two-
stage detection algorithm. Most of the subsequent algorithms
are improvements of the above algorithms.
II. ALGORITHM DESCRIPTION
Yolov3 [9] is a representative algorithm of the object
detection methods based on deep learning. Because of its high
accuracy and fast detection speed, we choose to make
improvements on the basis of Yolov3: We improve the feature
extraction network, feature fusion network and the loss function.
The structure of the improved detection network is shown
in Fig. 1.
 B. Feature Fusion Network
In the convolutional neural network, the bottom layer is the
shallower part of the convolutional network, and the feature
2x
map obtained at the bottom layer is large and has rich detailed
2x information, while its semantic information is weak. The top
layer is the deeper part of the convolutional network, and the
3x
feature map obtained at the top layer has a small size, and the
3x feature at the top layer is abstract and has rich semantic
information. The feature fusion network can enhance the
4x
information of different layers by fusing the features of
different layers, which is very important for improving the
detection performance, especially the detection performance of
small objects. The improved feature fusion network is shown in
Fig. 3.
Figure 1. The structure of improved detection network

In the following content, we will introduce this structure

respectively.
A. Feature Extraction Network
In the Yolov3 algorithm, the features extracted by the
network have an important impact on the detection results. The
improved feature extraction network structure is shown in Fig.
2.

Figure 3. The improved Feature Fusion Network

This structure adds a bottom-up structure to the FPN

structure. First, the feature map P1 is convoluted to obtain the
feature map A1. After the down sampling operation of feature
map A1, the obtained results are fused with feature maps P2 and
P3 to obtain feature maps A2 and A3 with fusion information,
which enhances the detail information of each layer. Finally,
these feature maps are used for detecting.
C. Loss function
In this paper, we use CIoU loss [11] to represent the loss of
Figure 2. The improved Feature Extraction Network the target box. The calculation formula of the CIoU loss
function is:
The improved feature extraction network consists of 15 p z(c ,cflr)
residual modules. The structure of each residual module uses LCloU = 1 - IoU + ------------ + a v (1
the channel attention mechanism [10]. The main process of the
mechanism is: At first, the mechanism uses 1*1 convolution to In the above formula, c and cst are the center point
reduce the number of channels to obtain the global information coordinates of the prediction box and the real box, and p
of the channel. Then the mechanism uses 1*1 convolution to represents the Euclidean distance between the two points, d is
recover the channel number to the input channel number and the diagonal distance of the smallest rectangular area containing
uses the sigmoid function to process the results. Finally, the
two boxes, a v is a penalty factor, which takes the aspect ratio
mechanism multiplies the obtained result with the original input
to get the final result. of the prediction box and the real box into account. The
calculation fonnula of a v is as follows:
The structure also uses the depth separable convolution
instead of ordinary convolution, which greatly reduces the
operation cost while ensuring the detection accuracy. (2 )
Finally, we take the output of the 5th Res Block(C1), the 4 w 3t w
11th Res Block(C2) and the 15th Res Block(C3) as the input of v — —z (a r c ta n — — - a rcta n — r
j i 2K h3t hJ (3)
the feature fusion network.
In the above two formulas. w 3 t and are the width
and height of the real box, and w and h are the width and
height of the prediction box.

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 III. Ex p e r im e n t a n d r e s u l t a n a l y s is The number of labeled boxed of human targets at sea is
In this paper, we use the Ubuntu 16.04 operating system, 226994, which lays a foundation for the training of the human
and use two Titan V Graphics cards for model training. In target detection model at sea.
addition, the deep learning framework we use is pytorch1 .2 B. Anchor box setting
version, and the python version we use is 3.7.
In this paper, we use the K-means++ algorithm to get anchor
A. Dataset boxes, and the obtained anchor boxes are (3,7), (5,10), (4,19),
(6,15), (9,17), (7,25), (11,25), (8,39), (11,49).
The dataset used in this experiment is the seaside human
dataset which is made by our teams. The dataset is formed by However, in the anchor boxes generated by the K-means++
collecting images, processing the images, and labeling the algorithm, there are some anchor boxes with similar sizes, such
human targets in the images. Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 are some samples as (4,19), (6,15), (9,17). Anchor boxes with similar sizes will
in the dataset. increase useless calculation in the process of object box
regression. In this paper, we use a linear transformation method
to deal with the generated anchor boxes. The transformation
formulas are as follows:
x'x — O.Sxj (4)
Xg = 2Xg
(5)
(Xj - i j )
x = (_Xg ~ X ' - y ) + X [
( X g ~ * i )
(6 )
,y*
yi = *
Figure 4. An image of the dataset (7)
In the above transformation formulas, x t and ) ', are the
width and height of the target box before transformation. x[
and y,' are the width and height of the target box after the
transformation. The anchor boxes obtained by this
transformation are (1,3), (3,7), (2,10), (4,11), (8,16), (6,21),
(11,25), (7,35), (11,49).
C. Analysis o f results
Since the purpose of this paper is to propose a detection
technology of drown people, and considering the effect of small
target detection, the detection accuracy of sea person when IOU
Figure 5. Other images of the dataset is 0.25 is used as the evaluation index. The experimental results
are shown in Table 1.
The dataset includes 6079 images and 528422 labeled boxes.
And the dataset divides the human targets into 4 categories: sea TABLE I. EXPERIMENT RESULTS
person (Seap), uncertain sea person (Unseap), land person Improved Improved New Seap
(Landp) and uncertain land person (Unlandp). Sea person refers CIoU
FEN FFN anchors AP25 (%)
to the human target at sea. The uncertain sea person refers to Yolov3 59.22
the uncertain human target at sea. The land person refers to the Yolov3-1 V 60.84
human target on land. The uncertain land person refers to the Yolov3-2 V V 64.04
Yolov3-3 V V V 69.16
uncertain human target on land. The statistical results of Yolov3-4 V V V V 72.17
different types of labeled boxes are shown in Fig. 6 .
284453

Yolov3 uses the anchor boxes generated by K-means++

clustering algorithm, and the detection accuracy of human
targets at sea reaches 59.22%. Yolov3-1 is improved on the
basis of Yolov3, which uses the improved feature extraction
network, and the detection accuracy value is increased from
59.22% to 60.84%, an increase of 1.62 percentage points.
Yolov3-2 is improved on the basis of Yolov3-1, which uses the
improved feature fusion network, and the detection accuracy
value is increased from 60.84% to 64.04%, an increase of 3.2
seap Landp
CATEGORIES
unseap unlandp
percentage points. Yolov3-3 is improved on the basis of
Figure 6. The number of different types of labeled boxes
Yolov3-2, which uses the CloU loss function, and the detection

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accuracy value is increased from 64.04% to 69.16%, an increase
of 5.12 percentage points. Yolov3-4 is improved on the basis of
Yolov3-3, which uses the anchor generated by the linear
transformation, and the detection accuracy value is increased
from 69.16% to 72.17%, an increase of 3.01 percentage points.
In summary, the detection accuracy value of the final improved
algorithm we proposed is 72.17%, which is nearly 13% higher
than the detection accuracy value of Yolov3.
In addition to using indicators to describe the detection
results, the effectiveness of the technology can be shown
directly from the image after detection. Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 show
the detection results of two different pictures.
Figure 7. The detection result of a picture
Figure 8. The detection result of another picture
In these two pictures, the human targets at sea are
surrounded by red boxes. It can be seen from these pictures that
most of human targets at sea have been detected, and human
targets at sea are correctly surrounded by the prediction box,
which proves the effectiveness of the detection technology
proposed in this paper. However, this technology also has many
shortcomings, for example, some human targets are not
detected in Fig. 8 , and only one target can be detected when two
targets are very close.
IV. Co n c l u s io n
At present, it is difficult to search and rescue drowning
people in the sea accidents. To solve this problem, we apply the
object detection technology to search drowning people, which
provides a new method for searching drowning people. In this
paper, we introduce the seaside human dataset made by
ourselves firstly, and then we improve the Yolov3 algorithm
according to the characteristics of small scale and weak feature
of drowning people. Finally, we proposed a method for detecting
human targets at sea, and we verified the effectiveness of the
proposed method through experiments on the seaside human
target dataset. Although this technology has certain
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effectiveness, there are still many shortcomings, such as
inaccurate prediction. Our subsequent research work will
continue to optimize it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
At the end of this article, I would like to thank some people
who are important to me. First of all, I would like to thank my
teacher Niu Fu, who has given me a lot of help in my study and
life. I would like to express my thanks to my partners of Beijing
Institute of electronics and control technology, who also have
helped me a lot. In addition, I would like to thank my parents,
it is their support that I can study at ease. Finally, I would like
to sincerely thank the teachers who have worked so hard to
review this article!
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