Infrared pedestrian target detection is affected by factors such as the low resolution and contrast of infrared pedestrian images, as well as the complexity of the background and the presence of multiple targets occluding each other, resulting in indistinct target features. To address these issues, this paper proposes a method to enhance the accuracy of pedestrian target detection by employing contour information to guide multi-scale feature detection. This involves analyzing the shapes and edges of the targets in infrared images at different scales to more accurately identify and differentiate them from the background and other targets. First, we propose a preprocessing method to suppress background interference and extract color information from visible images. Second, we propose an information fusion residual block combining a U-shaped structure and residual connection to form a feature extraction network. Then, we propose an attention mechanism based on a contour information-guided approach to guide the network to extract the depth features of pedestrian targets. Finally, we use the clustering method of mIoU to generate anchor frame sizes applicable to the KAIST pedestrian dataset and propose a hybrid loss function to enhance the network’s adaptability to pedestrian targets. The extensive experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper outperforms other comparative algorithms in pedestrian detection, proving its superiority.

Thermal infrared image colorization is very difficult, and colorized images suffer from poor texture detail recovery and low color matching. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes an Efficient and Effective Generative Adversarial Network (E2GAN). This paper proposes multi-level dense module, feature fusion module, and color-aware attention module in the improved generator. Adding multi-level dense module can enhance the feature extraction capability and the improve detail recovery capability Using the feature fusion module in the middle of the encoder–decoder reduces the information loss caused by encoder down-sampling and improves the prediction of fine color of the image. Using the color-aware attention module during up-sampling allows for capturing more semantic details, focusing on more key objects, and generating high-quality colorized images. And the proposed discriminator is the PatchGAN with color-aware attention module, which enhances its ability to discriminate between true and false colorized images. Meanwhile, this paper proposes a novel composite loss function that can improve the quality of colorized images, generate fine local details, and recover semantic and texture information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed E2GAN has significantly improved SSIM, PSNR, LPIPS, and NIQE on the KAIST dataset and the FLIR dataset compared to existing methods.