Improving YOLOv8 with parallel frequency channel attention for taxi passengers

Abstract

AbstractDetecting taxi passengers is crucial for assessing taxi driver behavior, which plays a significant role in regulating the taxi industry. Despite the advancements in deep learning, object detection algorithms have not been extensively applied to this domain. In this article, an innovative taxi passenger detection algorithm is introduced based on YOLOv8, a lightweight and highly accurate method designed to automatically monitor driver behavior and regulate the taxi industry. To address the challenge of deploying complex object detection models on mobile devices, the ghost module is incorporated in place of standard convolutions within the C2f module, thereby making the model more lightweight. Furthermore, the model's performance is enhanced by integrating an improved version of Frequency Channel Attention (FCA), termed Parallel Frequency Channel Attention (PFCA), which boosts detection accuracy with minimal additional parameters and computational overhead. Experimental results on a specific taxi passenger dataset demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the baseline YOLOv8n model. Specifically, the model reduces the number of parameters and floating point operations by 12.96% and 8.18%, respectively, while achieving increases in mAP50 and mAP50‐95 by 0.27 and 0.73 percentage points, respectively.