Low-light Pedestrian Detection in Visible and Infrared Image Feeds: Issues and Challenges

Pedestrian detection has become a cornerstone for several high-level tasks, including autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, and traffic surveillance. There are several works focussed on pedestrian detection using visible images, mainly in the daytime. However, this task is very intriguing when the environmental conditions change to poor lighting or nighttime. Recently, new ideas have been spurred to use alternative sources, such as Far InfraRed (FIR) temperature sensor feeds for detecting pedestrians in low-light conditions. This study comprehensively reviews recent developments in low-light pedestrian detection approaches. It systematically categorizes and analyses various algorithms from region-based to non-region-based and graph-based learning methodologies by highlighting their methodologies, implementation issues, and challenges. It also outlines the key benchmark datasets that can be used for research and development of advanced pedestrian detection algorithms, particularly in low-light situation

Robust human detection through fusion of color and infrared video

This PhD thesis develops and implements a robust multisensor human detection system based on fusing the information provided after segmenting infrared and color videos

Spatio-Temporal Information for Action Recognition in Thermal Video Using Deep Learning Model

Researchers can evaluate numerous information to ensure automated monitoring due to the widespread use of surveillance cameras in smart cities. For the monitoring of violence or abnormal behaviors in smart cities, schools, hospitals, residences, and other observational domains, an enhanced safety and security system is required to prevent any injuries that might result in ecological, economic and social losses. Automatic detection for prompt actions is vital and may help the respective departments effectively. Based on thermal imaging, several researchers have concentrated on object detection, tracking, and action identification. Few studies have simultaneously extracted spatial-temporal information from a thermal image and utilized it to recognize human actions. This research provides a novelty based on frame-level and spatial and temporal features which combines richer context temporal information to address the issue of poor efficiency and less accuracy in detecting abnormal/violent behavior in thermal monitoring devices. The model can locate (bounded box) video frame areas involving different human activities and recognize (classify) the actions. The dataset on human behavior includes videos captured with infrared cameras in both indoor and outdoor environments. The experimental results using the publicly available benchmark datasets reveal the proposed model\u27s efficiency. Our model achieves 98.5% and 94.85% accuracy on IITR Infrared Action Recognition (IITR-IAR) and Thermal Simulated Fall (TSF) datasets, respectively. In addition, the proposed method may be evaluated in more realistic conditions, such as zooming in and out etc

Real-time crowd density mapping using a novel sensory fusion model of infrared and visual systems

Crowd dynamic management research has seen significant attention in recent years in research and industry in an attempt to improve safety level and management of large scale events and in large public places such as stadiums, theatres, railway stations, subways and other places where high flow of people at high densities is expected. Failure to detect the crowd behaviour at the right time could lead to unnecessary injuries and fatalities. Over the past decades there have been many incidents of crowd which caused major injuries and fatalities and lead to physical damages. Examples of crowd disasters occurred in past decades include the tragedy of Hillsborough football stadium at Sheffield where at least 93 football supporters have been killed and 400 injured in 1989 in Britain's worst-ever sporting disaster (BBC, 1989). Recently in Cambodia a pedestrians stampede during the Water Festival celebration resulted in 345 deaths and 400 injuries (BBC, 2010) and in 2011 at least 16 people were killed and 50 others were injured in a stampede in the northern Indian town of Haridwar (BBC, 2011). Such disasters could be avoided or losses reduced by using different technologies. Crowd simulation models have been found effective in the prediction of potential crowd hazards in critical situations and thus help in reducing fatalities. However, there is a need to combine the advancement in simulation with real time crowd characterisation such as the estimation of real time density in order to provide accurate prognosis in crowd behaviour and enhance crowd management and safety, particularly in mega event such as the Hajj. This paper addresses the use of novel sensory technology in order to estimate people’s dynamic density du ring one of the Hajj activities. The ultimate goal is that real time accurate estimation of density in different areas within the crowd could help to improve the decision making process and provide more accurate prediction of the crowd dynamics. This paper investigates the use of infrared and visual cameras supported by auxiliary sensors and artificial intelligence to evaluate the accuracy in estimating crowd density in an open space during Muslims Pilgrimage to Makkah (Mecca)

Classification of Micromobility Vehicles in Thermal-Infrared Images Based on Combined Image and Contour Features Using Neuromorphic Processing

Trends of environmental awareness, combined with a focus on personal fitness and health, motivate many people to switch from cars and public transport to micromobility solutions, namely bicycles, electric bicycles, cargo bikes, or scooters. To accommodate urban planning for these changes, cities and communities need to know how many micromobility vehicles are on the road. In a previous work, we proposed a concept for a compact, mobile, and energy-efficient system to classify and count micromobility vehicles utilizing uncooled long-wave infrared (LWIR) image sensors and a neuromorphic co-processor. In this work, we elaborate on this concept by focusing on the feature extraction process with the goal to increase the classification accuracy. We demonstrate that even with a reduced feature list compared with our early concept, we manage to increase the detection precision to more than 90%. This is achieved by reducing the images of 160 × 120 pixels to only 12 × 18 pixels and combining them with contour moments to a feature vector of only 247 bytes

CNN-fusion architecture with visual and thermographic images for object detection

Mobile robots performing aircraft visual inspection play a vital role in the future automated aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) operations. Autonomous navigation requires understanding the surroundings to automate and enhance the visual inspection process. The current state of neural network (NN) based obstacle detection and collision avoidance techniques are suitable for well-structured objects. However, their ability to distinguish between solid obstacles and low-density moving objects is limited, and their performance degrades in low-light scenarios. Thermal images can be used to complement the low-light visual image limitations in many applications, including inspections. This work proposes a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) fusion architecture that enables the adaptive fusion of visual and thermographic images. The aim is to enhance autonomous robotic systems’ perception and collision avoidance in dynamic environments. The model has been tested with RGB and thermographic images acquired in Cranfield’s University hangar, which hosts a Boeing 737-400 and TUI hangar. The experimental results prove that the fusion-based CNN framework increases object detection accuracy compared to conventional models

Multispectral Deep Neural Network for Low Light Object Detection

In recent years, multi-modal object detection has garnered attention in the research community for automotive and surveillance applications. Visual and infrared image fusion has demonstrated promising results for object detection in adverse weather and lighting conditions due to infrared cameras being robust against illumination challenges. However, there is still a lack of studies on effectively fusing two modalities for optimal object detection performance. This thesis presents a novel approach to fuse visual and infrared images using Faster R-CNN with Feature Pyramid Network. The proposed network fuses visual and infrared channel features using concatenation operation. In addition to our proposal, we conduct comprehensive ablation experiments on KAIST and FLIR datasets. Our ablation experiments include fusion analysis using addition and concatenation operator at varying stages of the network. Our proposal and ablation experiments are evaluated on mean Average Precision (mAP), and Log-average miss rate (MR) evaluation metrics. Our extensive evaluation of the proposed framework demonstrates that our framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art benchmarks.Master of Science in EngineerigElectrical Engineering, College of Engineering & Computer ScienceUniversity of Michigan-Dearbornhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171092/1/Keval Thaker Final Thesis.pd