Effectiveness of Vision Transformer for Fast and Accurate Single-Stage Pedestrian Detection

Vision transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance on a variety of computer vision tasks. In this paper, we illustrate the effectiveness of the deformable vision transformer for single-stage pedestrian detection and propose a spatial and multi-scale feature enhancement module, which aims to achieve the optimal balance between speed and accuracy. Performance improvement with vision transformers on various commonly used single-stage structures is demonstrated. The design of the proposed architecture is investigated in depth. Comprehensive comparisons with state-of-the-art single- and two-stage detectors on different pedestrian datasets are performed.