Abstract: Detecting pedestrians with on-board vision systems is of paramount interest for assisting drivers to prevent vehicle-to-pedestrian accidents. The core of a pedestrian detector is its classification module, which aims at deciding if a given image window contains a pedestrian. Given the difficulty of this task, many classifiers have been proposed during the last fifteen years. Among them, the so-called (deformable) part-based classifiers including multi-view modeling are usually top ranked in accuracy. Training such classifiers is not trivial since a proper aspect clustering and spatial part alignment of the pedestrian training samples are crucial for obtaining an accurate classifier. In this paper, first we perform automatic aspect clustering and part alignment by using virtual-world pedestrians, i.e., human annotations are not required. Second, we use a mixture-of-parts approach that allows part sharing among different aspects. Third, these proposals are integrated in a learning framework which also allows to incorporate real-world training data to perform domain adaptation between virtual- and real-world cameras. Overall, the obtained results on four popular on-board datasets show that our proposal clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art deformable part-based detector known as latent SVM.

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the problem of visual odometry for ground vehicles based on the simultaneous utilization of multispectral cameras. It encompasses a stereo rig composed of an optical (visible) and thermal sensors. The novelty resides in the localization of the cameras as a stereo setup rather
than two monocular cameras of different spectrums. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such task is attempted. Log-Gabor wavelets at different orientations and scales are used to extract interest points from both images. These are then described using a combination of frequency and spatial information within the local neighborhood. Matches between the pairs of multimodal images are computed using the cosine similarity function based
on the descriptors. Pyramidal Lucas–Kanade tracker is also introduced to tackle temporal feature matching within challenging sequences of the data sets. The vehicle egomotion is computed from the triangulated 3-D points corresponding to the matched features. A windowed version of bundle adjustment incorporating
Gauss–Newton optimization is utilized for motion estimation. An outlier removal scheme is also included within the framework to deal with outliers. Multispectral data sets were generated and used as test bed. They correspond to real outdoor scenarios captured using our multimodal setup. Finally, detailed results validating the proposed strategy are illustrated.

Abstract: This paper evaluates different wavelet-based cross-spectral image fusion strategies adopted to merge visible and infrared images. The objective is to find the best setup independently of the evaluation metric used to measure the performance. Quantitative performance results are obtained with state of the art approaches together with adaptations proposed in the current work. The options evaluated in the current work result from the combination of different setups in the wavelet image decomposition stage together with different fusion strategies for the final merging stage that generates the resulting representation. Most of the approaches evaluate results according to the application for which they are intended for. Sometimes a human observer is selected to judge the quality of the obtained results. In the current work, quantitative values are considered in order to find correlations between setups and performance of obtained results; these correlations can be used to define a criteria for selecting the best fusion strategy for a given pair of cross-spectral images. The whole procedure is evaluated with a large set of correctly registered visible and infrared image pairs, including both Near InfraRed (NIR) and Long Wave InfraRed (LWIR).