Feature Enhancement Based on CycleGAN for Nighttime Vehicle Detection

Existing night vehicle detection methods mainly detect vehicles by detecting headlights or taillights. However, these features are adversely affected by the complex road lighting environment. In this paper, a cascade detection network framework FteGanOd is proposed with a feature translate-enhancement (FTE) module and the object detection (OD) module. First, the FTE module is built based on CycleGAN and multi-scale feature fusion is proposed to enhance the detection of vehicle features at night. The features of night and day are combined by fusing different convolutional layers to produce enhanced feature (EF) maps. Second, the OD module, based on the existing object detection network, is improved by cascading with the FTE module to detect vehicles on the EF maps. The proposed FteGanOd method recognizes vehicles at night with greater accuracy by improving the contrast between vehicles and the background and by suppressing interference from ambient light. The proposed FteGanOd is validated on the Berkeley Deep Drive (BDD) dataset and our private dataset. The experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively enhance vehicle features and improve the accuracy of vehicle detection at night.