DWCA-YOLOv5: An Improve Single Shot Detector for Safety Helmet Detection

Aiming at solving the problem that the detection methods used in the existing helmet detection research has low detection efficiency and the cumulative error influences accuracy, a new algorithm for improving YOLOv5 helmet wearing detection is proposed. First of all, we use the - means++ algorithm to improve the size matching degree of the a priori anchor box; secondly, integrate the Depthwise Coordinate Attention (DWCA) mechanism in the backbone network, so that the network can learn the weight of each channel independently and enhance the information dissemination between features, thereby strengthening the network’s ability to distinguish foreground and background. The experimental results show as follows: in the self-made safety helmet wearing detection dataset, the average accuracy rate reached 95.9%, the average accuracy of the helmet detection reached 96.5%, and the average accuracy of the worker’s head detection reached 95.2%. Making a comparison with the YOLOv5 algorithm, our model has a 3% increase in the average accuracy of helmet detection, which is in line with the accuracy requirements of helmet wearing detection in complex construction scenarios.