A method of cross-layer fusion multi-object detection and recognition based on improved faster R-CNN model in complex traffic environment

•Cross-layer Fusion.•Multi-object Detection and Recognition.•Faster R-CNN Model.•Multi-class cross entropy loss function.•Soft-NMS. Improving the detection accuracy and speed is the prerequisite of multi-object recognition in the complex traffic environment. Despite object detection has made significant advances based on deep neural networks, it remains a challenge to focus on small and occlusion objects. We address this challenge by allowing multiscale fusion. We introduce a cross-layer fusion multi-object detection and recognition algorithm based on Faster R-CNN, an approach that the five-layer structure of VGG16 (Visual Geometry Group) is used to obtain more characteristic information. We implement this idea with lateral embedding the 1×1 convolution kernel, max pooling and deconvolution, in conjunction with weighted balanced multi-class cross entropy loss function and Soft-NMS to control the imbalance between difficult and easy samples. Considering the actual situation in a complex traffic environment, we manually label mixed dataset. On Cityscapes and KITTI datasets, experimental results show that the proposed model achieves better effects than the current mainstream object detection models.