An Improved RT-DETR-Based Object Detection Algorithm for Gm-APD LiDAR

Gm-APD LiDAR has a high sensitivity response characteristic, enabling imaging for detecting targets at extended distances, and finds broad utility. However, the highly sensitive response characteristic also makes Gm-APD LiDAR vulnerable to noise, resulting in poor imaging quality and challenging the application of target detection algorithms to this type of LiDAR. Therefore, this paper proposes a long-range vehicle detection model DRT-DETR for Gm-APD LiDAR. DRT-DETR is based on RT-DETR and employs a dual-channel feature extraction backbone, which combines with the lightweight FasterNet Block to capture semantic features from distance and intensity images effectively. It also incorporates mixed attention modules to selectively combine and enhance key features from both types of images. Attention-based Intrascale Feature Interaction employs cascaded group attention as a replacement for multi-head attention in order to minimize computational redundancy. Finally, Dysample is used instead of nearest neighbor upsampling in the cross-scale feature fusion to align features better and minimize distortion. The improved model boosts detection accuracy by 3.8% over RT-DETR and outperforms other common object detection models on the dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness.