Detection of Approaching Pedestrians from a Distance Using Temporal Intensity Patterns

Pedestrians captured from real world surveillance cameras can often be in frontal view. This is true for surveillance cameras installed in bridges and corridors. Surveillance cameras in these environments are often oriented in the direction along the passage. In such a setting, many of the walking pedestrians would often appear to be approaching the camera. In this paper, we focus on the detection of these pedestrians from a distance. Common pedestrian detection algorithms such as background subtraction or motion detection do not work well for approaching pedestrians in the distance when viewing the pedestrians from the front view. We, therefore, propose to detect such pedestrians using temporal pattern of intensity observed from a pair of human walking legs. Thorough discussion of the detection algorithm is presented in this paper. Evaluation results show that pedestrians of image size as small as 30 pixels tall can be detected using our algorithm. Our method can be utilized in intelligent surveillance systems for initiating tracking process and subsequent recognition of pedestrians from a distance.