Real-time on-board pedestrian detection using generic single-stage algorithms and on-road databases

Abstract

Pedestrian detection is a particular case of object detection that helps to reduce accidents in advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous vehicles. It is not an easy task because of the variability of the objects and the time constraints. A performance comparison of object detection methods, including both GPU and non-GPU implementations over a variety of on-road specific databases, is provided. Computer vision multi-class object detection can be integrated on sensor fusion modules where recall is preferred over precision. For this reason, ad hoc training with a single class for pedestrians has been performed and we achieved a significant increase in recall. Experiments have been carried out on several architectures and a special effort has been devoted to achieve a feasible computational time for a real-time system. Finally, an analysis of the input image size allows to fine-tune the model and get better results with practical costs.