G-YOLOX: A Lightweight Network for Detecting Vehicle Types

In recent years, vehicle type detection has had an important role in traffic management. A lightweight detection network based on multiscale ghost convolution called G-YOLOX is designed in this paper. It is suitable for practical applications for an embedded device. Specifically, 3×3 convolutions and 5×5 and 7×7 ghost convolutions are combined to fully utilize different feature information. A series of linear transformations was designed to generate ghost feature maps to ensure that the network is lightweight. Moreover, a dataset of images showing different vehicles in a city environment was established. Altogether, 20,000 road scene images were collected, and seven categories of vehicles were identified. Extensive experiments with the benchmark datasets VOC2007 and VOC2012 and with our dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed G-YOLOX over the original YOLOX. The proposed G-YOLOX can achieve a nearly invariable mean average precision of 0.5, while the size of the weight file decreased by 40% and the number of parameters decreased by 67% compared to the original YOLOX network.