MCA-YOLOV5-Light: A Faster, Stronger and Lighter Algorithm for Helmet-Wearing Detection

Abstract

Featured Application: Authors are encouraged to provide a concise description of the specific application or a potential application of the work. This section is not mandatory. It is an essential measure for workers to wear safety helmets when entering the construction site to prevent head injuries caused by object collision and falling. This paper proposes a lightweight algorithm for helmet-wearing detection based on YOLOV5, which is faster and more robust for helmet detection in natural construction scenarios. In this paper, the MCA attention mechanism is embedded in the backbone network to help the network extract more productive information, reduce the missed detection rate of small helmet objects and improve detection accuracy. In order to ensure the safety of workers in construction, it is necessary to detect whether the construction workers are wearing safety helmets in real-time to achieve monitoring on-site. A channel pruning strategy is proposed on the MCA-YOLOv5 algorithm to compress it, realizing the optimal large-scale model into ultrasmall models for real-time detection on embedded or mobile devices. The experimental results on the public data set show that the model parameter volume is reduced by 87.2%, and the detection speed is increased by 53.5%, even though the MCA-YOLOv5-light reduces the mAP slightly.