Image Processing and Deep Learning Based Road Object Detection System for Safe Transportation

Road object detection, a pivotal task in computer vision and artificial intelligence, is dedicated to the identification and precise localization of a diverse array of elements on roadways, including vehicles, pedestrians, road signs, traffic lights, and potential obstacles. The essence of this task lies in its ability to provide real-time and precise object detection, ultimately serving as a crucial safeguard to prevent accidents and ensure the safety of drivers, passengers, and pedestrians. It also lays the foundation for advanced warning systems and aids in collision avoidance. Several popular models were implemented, encompassing YOLOv7, YOLOv7-Modified, YOLOv7-Tiny, YOLOv7-E6E, Faster R-CNN, and SSD. Among these, YOLOv7 achieved an impressive mean average precision (mAP) of 83.6%, with an inference speed of 15.1 ms, while YOLOv7E6E achieved the highest mAP of 86.2%, but with the cost of a slower inference speed of 30.3 ms. The modified version of YOLOv7 has produced 2.2% higher average precision accuracy (89.1%) than the main version of YOLOv7 due to its double RepVGG layers, skip connection and concatenation layers in the head architecture. To make this research accessible to a wider audience, a user-friendly web application is developed with an intuitive interface.