Pedestrian Detection and Tracking in Urban Context Using a Mono-camera

Jalakäijate tuvastus ja jälgimine on üks tähtsamaid aspekte edasijõudnud sõitja abisüsteemides. Need süsteemid aitavad vältida ohtlikke olukordi, juhendades sõitjaid ja hoiatades ettetulevate riskide eest. Jalakäijate tuvastuse ja jälgimise põhiideed on tuvastada jalakäijad siis, kui nad on turvalises tsoonis ja ennustada nende asukohta ja suunda. Selle lõputöö eesmärk on uurida võimalikke meetodeid ja arendada nende põhjal hea algoritm jalakäijate tuvastuseks ja jälgimiseks.Selles lõputöös arendatud lahendus keskendub jalakäija täpsele tuvastamisele ja jälgimisele. Süsteemi täpsuse hindamiseks on saadud tulemusi võrreldud olemasolevate lahendustega.Pedestrian detection and tracking are one of the important aspects in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. These systems help to avoid dangerous situations, by guiding drivers and warning them about the upcoming risks. The main ideas of pedestrian detection and tracking are to detect pedestrians, while they are in the secure zone, and predict their position and direction.The goal of this thesis is to examine possible methods and based on these, to develop a good pedestrian detection and tracking algorithm. The solution developed in this thesis, focuses on accurately detecting and tracking a pedestrian. In order to estimate the accuracy of the system, obtained results will be compared to the existing solutions

Real-time object detection using monocular vision for low-cost automotive sensing systems

This work addresses the problem of real-time object detection in automotive environments using monocular vision. The focus is on real-time feature detection, tracking, depth estimation using monocular vision and finally, object detection by fusing visual saliency and depth information. Firstly, a novel feature detection approach is proposed for extracting stable and dense features even in images with very low signal-to-noise ratio. This methodology is based on image gradients, which are redefined to take account of noise as part of their mathematical model. Each gradient is based on a vector connecting a negative to a positive intensity centroid, where both centroids are symmetric about the centre of the area for which the gradient is calculated. Multiple gradient vectors define a feature with its strength being proportional to the underlying gradient vector magnitude. The evaluation of the Dense Gradient Features (DeGraF) shows superior performance over other contemporary detectors in terms of keypoint density, tracking accuracy, illumination invariance, rotation invariance, noise resistance and detection time. The DeGraF features form the basis for two new approaches that perform dense 3D reconstruction from a single vehicle-mounted camera. The first approach tracks DeGraF features in real-time while performing image stabilisation with minimal computational cost. This means that despite camera vibration the algorithm can accurately predict the real-world coordinates of each image pixel in real-time by comparing each motion-vector to the ego-motion vector of the vehicle. The performance of this approach has been compared to different 3D reconstruction methods in order to determine their accuracy, depth-map density, noise-resistance and computational complexity. The second approach proposes the use of local frequency analysis of i ii gradient features for estimating relative depth. This novel method is based on the fact that DeGraF gradients can accurately measure local image variance with subpixel accuracy. It is shown that the local frequency by which the centroid oscillates around the gradient window centre is proportional to the depth of each gradient centroid in the real world. The lower computational complexity of this methodology comes at the expense of depth map accuracy as the camera velocity increases, but it is at least five times faster than the other evaluated approaches. This work also proposes a novel technique for deriving visual saliency maps by using Division of Gaussians (DIVoG). In this context, saliency maps express the difference of each image pixel is to its surrounding pixels across multiple pyramid levels. This approach is shown to be both fast and accurate when evaluated against other state-of-the-art approaches. Subsequently, the saliency information is combined with depth information to identify salient regions close to the host vehicle. The fused map allows faster detection of high-risk areas where obstacles are likely to exist. As a result, existing object detection algorithms, such as the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) can execute at least five times faster. In conclusion, through a step-wise approach computationally-expensive algorithms have been optimised or replaced by novel methodologies to produce a fast object detection system that is aligned to the requirements of the automotive domain

Towards a Common Software/Hardware Methodology for Future Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

The European research project DESERVE (DEvelopment platform for Safe and Efficient dRiVE, 2012-2015) had the aim of designing and developing a platform tool to cope with the continuously increasing complexity and the simultaneous need to reduce cost for future embedded Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). For this purpose, the DESERVE platform profits from cross-domain software reuse, standardization of automotive software component interfaces, and easy but safety-compliant integration of heterogeneous modules. This enables the development of a new generation of ADAS applications, which challengingly combine different functions, sensors, actuators, hardware platforms, and Human Machine Interfaces (HMI). This book presents the different results of the DESERVE project concerning the ADAS development platform, test case functions, and validation and evaluation of different approaches. The reader is invited to substantiate the content of this book with the deliverables published during the DESERVE project. Technical topics discussed in this book include:Modern ADAS development platforms;Design space exploration;Driving modelling;Video-based and Radar-based ADAS functions;HMI for ADAS;Vehicle-hardware-in-the-loop validation system

VIDEO FRAME REDUCTION IN AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

Camera sensors are emerging in many applications such as Smart Buildings and autonomous driving. The Data generated by multiple cameras in a smart building and autonomous driving applications is usually transmitted through an edge box to a cloud terminal. This transmitted information requires a considerable channel bandwidth, which is not available through current communication standards. The report proposes a Camera Sensor Frame Reduction method to decrease the required channel bandwidth for applications such as autonomous driving. Here, we propose a method that incorporates cross frame similarity measurement method to reduce the redundant frames and decrease the data rate of each camera. This approach adds processing to the camera sensor, which maps each camera to a smart one. In order to calculate cross frame correlation, each smart camera converts frames into blocks of sub-images. Next, we incorporate consecutive blocks to compute the overall cross frame correlation. The report studies block size selection and its impact on processing complexity and performance. We used real vehicle videos in different driving speed and scenarios to study the complexity and performance of the proposed method. We have investigated frame reduction rate as a function of vehicle traffic and driving environment

Region of Interest Generation for Pedestrian Detection using Stereo Vision

Pedestrian detection is an active research area in the field of computer vision. The sliding window paradigm is usually followed to extract all possible detector windows, however, it is very time consuming. Subsequently, stereo vision using a pair of camera is preferred to reduce the search space that includes the depth information. Disparity map generation using feature correspondence is an integral part and a prior task to depth estimation. In our work, we apply the ORB features to fasten the feature correspondence process. Once the ROI generation phase is over, the extracted detector window is represented by low level histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features. Subsequently, Linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) is applied to classify them as either pedestrian or non-pedestrian. The experimental results reveal that ORB driven depth estimation is at least seven times faster than the SURF descriptor and ten times faster than the SIFT descriptor

Developing Predictive Models of Driver Behaviour for the Design of Advanced Driving Assistance Systems

World-wide injuries in vehicle accidents have been on the rise in recent years, mainly due to driver error. The main objective of this research is to develop a predictive system for driving maneuvers by analyzing the cognitive behavior (cephalo-ocular) and the driving behavior of the driver (how the vehicle is being driven). Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS) include different driving functions, such as vehicle parking, lane departure warning, blind spot detection, and so on. While much research has been performed on developing automated co-driver systems, little attention has been paid to the fact that the driver plays an important role in driving events. Therefore, it is crucial to monitor events and factors that directly concern the driver. As a goal, we perform a quantitative and qualitative analysis of driver behavior to find its relationship with driver intentionality and driving-related actions. We have designed and developed an instrumented vehicle (RoadLAB) that is able to record several synchronized streams of data, including the surrounding environment of the driver, vehicle functions and driver cephalo-ocular behavior, such as gaze/head information. We subsequently analyze and study the behavior of several drivers to find out if there is a meaningful relation between driver behavior and the next driving maneuver

Self-Selective Correlation Ship Tracking Method for Smart Ocean System

In recent years, with the development of the marine industry, navigation environment becomes more complicated. Some artificial intelligence technologies, such as computer vision, can recognize, track and count the sailing ships to ensure the maritime security and facilitates the management for Smart Ocean System. Aiming at the scaling problem and boundary effect problem of traditional correlation filtering methods, we propose a self-selective correlation filtering method based on box regression (BRCF). The proposed method mainly include: 1) A self-selective model with negative samples mining method which effectively reduces the boundary effect in strengthening the classification ability of classifier at the same time; 2) A bounding box regression method combined with a key points matching method for the scale prediction, leading to a fast and efficient calculation. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively deal with the problem of ship size changes and background interference. The success rates and precisions were higher than Discriminative Scale Space Tracking (DSST) by over 8 percentage points on the marine traffic dataset of our laboratory. In terms of processing speed, the proposed method is higher than DSST by nearly 22 Frames Per Second (FPS)

Towards a Common Software/Hardware Methodology for Future Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

The European research project DESERVE (DEvelopment platform for Safe and Efficient dRiVE, 2012-2015) had the aim of designing and developing a platform tool to cope with the continuously increasing complexity and the simultaneous need to reduce cost for future embedded Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). For this purpose, the DESERVE platform profits from cross-domain software reuse, standardization of automotive software component interfaces, and easy but safety-compliant integration of heterogeneous modules. This enables the development of a new generation of ADAS applications, which challengingly combine different functions, sensors, actuators, hardware platforms, and Human Machine Interfaces (HMI). This book presents the different results of the DESERVE project concerning the ADAS development platform, test case functions, and validation and evaluation of different approaches. The reader is invited to substantiate the content of this book with the deliverables published during the DESERVE project. Technical topics discussed in this book include:Modern ADAS development platforms;Design space exploration;Driving modelling;Video-based and Radar-based ADAS functions;HMI for ADAS;Vehicle-hardware-in-the-loop validation system