Strengthening the Effectiveness of Pedestrian Detection with Spatially Pooled Features

We propose a simple yet effective approach to the problem of pedestrian detection which outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Our new features are built on the basis of low-level visual features and spatial pooling. Incorporating spatial pooling improves the translational invariance and thus the robustness of the detection process. We then directly optimise the partial area under the ROC curve (\pAUC) measure, which concentrates detection performance in the range of most practical importance. The combination of these factors leads to a pedestrian detector which outperforms all competitors on all of the standard benchmark datasets. We advance state-of-the-art results by lowering the average miss rate from $13\%$ to $11\%$ on the INRIA benchmark, $41\%$ to $37\%$ on the ETH benchmark, $51\%$ to $42\%$ on the TUD-Brussels benchmark and $36\%$ to $29\%$ on the Caltech-USA benchmark.Comment: 16 pages. Appearing in Proc. European Conf. Computer Vision (ECCV) 201

Fusion of Multispectral Data Through Illumination-aware Deep Neural Networks for Pedestrian Detection

Multispectral pedestrian detection has received extensive attention in recent years as a promising solution to facilitate robust human target detection for around-the-clock applications (e.g. security surveillance and autonomous driving). In this paper, we demonstrate illumination information encoded in multispectral images can be utilized to significantly boost performance of pedestrian detection. A novel illumination-aware weighting mechanism is present to accurately depict illumination condition of a scene. Such illumination information is incorporated into two-stream deep convolutional neural networks to learn multispectral human-related features under different illumination conditions (daytime and nighttime). Moreover, we utilized illumination information together with multispectral data to generate more accurate semantic segmentation which are used to boost pedestrian detection accuracy. Putting all of the pieces together, we present a powerful framework for multispectral pedestrian detection based on multi-task learning of illumination-aware pedestrian detection and semantic segmentation. Our proposed method is trained end-to-end using a well-designed multi-task loss function and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on KAIST multispectral pedestrian dataset

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

What Makes a Place? Building Bespoke Place Dependent Object Detectors for Robotics

This paper is about enabling robots to improve their perceptual performance through repeated use in their operating environment, creating local expert detectors fitted to the places through which a robot moves. We leverage the concept of 'experiences' in visual perception for robotics, accounting for bias in the data a robot sees by fitting object detector models to a particular place. The key question we seek to answer in this paper is simply: how do we define a place? We build bespoke pedestrian detector models for autonomous driving, highlighting the necessary trade off between generalisation and model capacity as we vary the extent of the place we fit to. We demonstrate a sizeable performance gain over a current state-of-the-art detector when using computationally lightweight bespoke place-fitted detector models.Comment: IROS 201

Spatiotemporal Stacked Sequential Learning for Pedestrian Detection

Pedestrian classifiers decide which image windows contain a pedestrian. In practice, such classifiers provide a relatively high response at neighbor windows overlapping a pedestrian, while the responses around potential false positives are expected to be lower. An analogous reasoning applies for image sequences. If there is a pedestrian located within a frame, the same pedestrian is expected to appear close to the same location in neighbor frames. Therefore, such a location has chances of receiving high classification scores during several frames, while false positives are expected to be more spurious. In this paper we propose to exploit such correlations for improving the accuracy of base pedestrian classifiers. In particular, we propose to use two-stage classifiers which not only rely on the image descriptors required by the base classifiers but also on the response of such base classifiers in a given spatiotemporal neighborhood. More specifically, we train pedestrian classifiers using a stacked sequential learning (SSL) paradigm. We use a new pedestrian dataset we have acquired from a car to evaluate our proposal at different frame rates. We also test on a well known dataset: Caltech. The obtained results show that our SSL proposal boosts detection accuracy significantly with a minimal impact on the computational cost. Interestingly, SSL improves more the accuracy at the most dangerous situations, i.e. when a pedestrian is close to the camera.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure, 1 tabl