Multi-Modal Pedestrian Detection on the Move

Citation

Kira, Z.; Southall, B.; Kuthirummal, S.; Matei, B.; Hadsell, R.; Eledath, J., “Multi-modal pedestrian detection on the move,” Technologies for Practical Robot Applications (TePRA), 2012 IEEE International Conference on, vol., no., pp.157,162, 23-24 April 2012

Abstract

This paper presents an on-the-move pedestrian detection system that utilizes multiple sensor modalities to improve detection rates at deployable computational loads. The system was developed for a vehicle moving up to 40 kph that can detect moving pedestrians up to a distance of 50m, with support for both day and night operations. In the day, 3D pointclouds obtained from an 8-layer LIDAR sensor are processed to produce a labeling of the scene distinguishing ground, large structures, and potential pedestrians to produce reliable detections in the short range (up to 30m), while a stereo-based detection and classification system is used for ranges between 30-50m+. We describe the algorithms in detail and show that the combined system allows for reliable detection at faster frame-rates than when using each sensor or component individually. A second method for fusing two IR cameras with the LIDAR sensor is proposed for night operations, where LIDAR is used to produce multi-scale masks that define the search space for a HOG-based pedestrian classifier.


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