Butterfly network: a convolutional neural network with a new architecture for multi-scale semantic segmentation of pedestrians

The detection of multi-scale pedestrians is one of the challenging tasks in pedestrian detection applications. Moreover, the task of small-scale pedestrian detection, i.e., accurate localization of pedestrians as low-scale target objects, can help solve the issue of occluded pedestrian detection as well. In this paper, we present a fully convolutional neural network with a new architecture and an innovative, fully detailed supervision for semantic segmentation of pedestrians. The proposed network has been named butterfly network (BF-Net) because of its architecture analogous to a butterfly. The proposed BF-Net preserves the ability of simplicity so that it can process static images with a real-time image processing rate. The sub-path blocks embedded in the architecture of the proposed BF-Net provides a higher accuracy for detecting multi-scale objective targets including the small ones. The other advantage of the proposed architecture is replacing common batch normalization with conditional one. In conclusion, the experimental results of the proposed method demonstrate that the proposed network outperform the other state-of-the-art networks such as U-Net + + , U-Net3 + , Mask-RCNN, and Deeplabv3 + for the semantic segmentation of the pedestrians.