PDE: A Real-Time Object Detection and Enhancing Model under Low Visibility Conditions

Deep object detection models are important tools that can accurately detect objects and frame them for the user in real time. However, in low visibility conditions, such as fog or low light conditions, the captured images are underexposed and blurred, which negatively affects the recognition accuracy and is not well visible to humans. In addition, the image enhancement model is complex and time-consuming. Using the image enhancement model before the object recognition model cannot meet the real-time requirements. Therefore, we propose the Parallel Detection and Enhancement model (PDE), which detects objects and enhances poorly visible images in parallel and in real time. Specifically, we introduce the specially designed tiny prediction head along with coordinated attention and multi-stage concatenation modules to better detect underexposed and blurred objects. For the parallel image enhancement model, we adaptively develop improved weighting evaluation models for each “3D Lookup Table” module. As a result, PDE achieves better detection accuracy for poorly visible objects and more user-friendly reference in real time. Experimental results show that PDE has significantly better object recognition performance than the state-of-the-art on real foggy (8.9%) and low-light (20.6%) datasets.