What Can Help Pedestrian Detection?

Aggregating extra features has been considered as an effective approach to boost traditional pedestrian detection methods. However, there is still a lack of studies on whether and how CNN-based pedestrian detectors can benefit from these extra features. The first contribution of this paper is exploring this issue by aggregating extra features into CNN-based pedestrian detection framework. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate the effects of different kinds of extra features quantitatively. Moreover, we propose a novel network architecture, namely HyperLearner, to jointly learn pedestrian detection as well as the given extra feature. By multi-task training, HyperLearner is able to utilize the information of given features and improve detection performance without extra inputs in inference. The experimental results on multiple pedestrian benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed HyperLearner.Comment: Accepted to IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 201

Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey

Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Its development in the past two decades can be regarded as an epitome of computer vision history. If we think of today's object detection as a technical aesthetics under the power of deep learning, then turning back the clock 20 years we would witness the wisdom of cold weapon era. This paper extensively reviews 400+ papers of object detection in the light of its technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2019). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed up techniques, and the recent state of the art detection methods. This paper also reviews some important detection applications, such as pedestrian detection, face detection, text detection, etc, and makes an in-deep analysis of their challenges as well as technical improvements in recent years.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE TPAMI for possible publicatio

Learning Complexity-Aware Cascades for Deep Pedestrian Detection

The design of complexity-aware cascaded detectors, combining features of very different complexities, is considered. A new cascade design procedure is introduced, by formulating cascade learning as the Lagrangian optimization of a risk that accounts for both accuracy and complexity. A boosting algorithm, denoted as complexity aware cascade training (CompACT), is then derived to solve this optimization. CompACT cascades are shown to seek an optimal trade-off between accuracy and complexity by pushing features of higher complexity to the later cascade stages, where only a few difficult candidate patches remain to be classified. This enables the use of features of vastly different complexities in a single detector. In result, the feature pool can be expanded to features previously impractical for cascade design, such as the responses of a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). This is demonstrated through the design of a pedestrian detector with a pool of features whose complexities span orders of magnitude. The resulting cascade generalizes the combination of a CNN with an object proposal mechanism: rather than a pre-processing stage, CompACT cascades seamlessly integrate CNNs in their stages. This enables state of the art performance on the Caltech and KITTI datasets, at fairly fast speeds

Unsupervised Network Pretraining via Encoding Human Design

Over the years, computer vision researchers have spent an immense amount of effort on designing image features for the visual object recognition task. We propose to incorporate this valuable experience to guide the task of training deep neural networks. Our idea is to pretrain the network through the task of replicating the process of hand-designed feature extraction. By learning to replicate the process, the neural network integrates previous research knowledge and learns to model visual objects in a way similar to the hand-designed features. In the succeeding finetuning step, it further learns object-specific representations from labeled data and this boosts its classification power. We pretrain two convolutional neural networks where one replicates the process of histogram of oriented gradients feature extraction, and the other replicates the process of region covariance feature extraction. After finetuning, we achieve substantially better performance than the baseline methods.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, WACV 2016: IEEE Conference on Applications of Computer Visio