Abstract: Los sistemas de asistencia al conductor, y particularmente los sistemas de protección de peatones, representan uno de los campos de investigación más activos dedicados a la mejora de la seguridad vial. El mayor desafío es el desarrollo de sistemas a bordo fiables de detección de peatones. En esta revisión del estado de la técnica de la detección de peatones, se divide el problema en diferentes etapas, cada una con responsabilidades propias dentro del sistema. Esta división facilita el posterior análisis y discusión de cada uno de los métodos en la literatura, favoreciendo la comparación entre ellos. Finalmente se discuten los temas más importantes de este campo poniendo especial énfasis en las necesidades actuales y los desafíos futuros.

Abstract: Pedestrian Protection Systems (PPSs) are on-board systems aimed at detecting and tracking people in the surroundings of a vehicle in order to avoid potentially dangerous situations. These systems, together with other Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) such as lane departure warning or adaptive cruise control, are one of the most promising ways to improve traffic safety. By the use of computer vision, cameras working either in the visible or infra-red spectra have been demonstrated as a reliable sensor to perform this task. Nevertheless, the variability of human’s appearance, not only in terms of clothing and sizes but also as a result of their dynamic shape, makes pedestrians one of the most complex classes even for computer vision. Moreover, the unstructured changing and unpredictable environment in which such on-board systems must work makes detection a difficult task to be carried out with the demanded robustness. In this brief, the state of the art in PPSs is introduced through the review of the most relevant papers of the last decade. A common computational architecture is presented as a framework to organize each method according to its main contribution. More than 300 papers are referenced, most of them addressing pedestrian detection and others corresponding to the descriptors (features), pedestrian models, and learning machines used. In addition, an overview of topics such as real-time aspects, systems benchmarking and future challenges of this research area are presented.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a combination of different Haar filter sets and Edge Orientation Histograms (EOH) in order to learn a model for pedestrian detection. As we will show, with the addition of EOH we obtain better ROCs than using Haar filters alone. Hence, a model consisting of discriminant features, selected by AdaBoost, is applied at pedestrian-sized image windows in order to perform
the classification. Additionally, taking into account the final application, a driver assistance system with realtime requirements, we propose a novel stereo-based camera pitch estimation to reduce the number of explored windows.
With this approach, the system can work in urban roads, as will be illustrated by current results.

Abstract: This chapter describes a stereo-based algorithm that provides candidate image windows to a latter 2D classification stage in an on-board pedestrian detection system. The proposed algorithm, which consists of three stages, is based on the use of both stereo imaging and scene prior knowledge (i.e., pedestrians are on the ground) to reduce the candidate searching space. First, a successful road surface fitting algorithm provides estimates on the relative ground-camera pose. This stage directs the search toward the road area thus avoiding irrelevant regions like the sky. Then, three different schemes are used to scan the estimated road surface with pedestrian-sized windows: (a) uniformly distributed through the road surface (3D); (b) uniformly distributed through the image (2D); (c) not uniformly distributed but according to a quadratic function (combined 2D-3D). Finally, the set of candidate windows is reduced by analyzing their 3D content. Experimental results of the proposed algorithm, together with statistics of searching space reduction are provided.

Abstract: At the beginning of the 21th century, traffic accidents have become a major problem not only for developed countries but also for emerging ones. As in other scientific areas in which Artificial Intelligence is becoming a key actor, advanced driver assistance systems, and concretely pedestrian protection systems based on Computer Vision, are becoming a strong topic of research aimed at improving the safety of pedestrians. However, the challenge is of considerable complexity due to the varying appearance of humans (e.g., clothes, size, aspect ratio, shape, etc.), the dynamic nature of on-board systems and the unstructured moving environments that urban scenarios represent. In addition, the required performance is demanding both in terms of computational time and detection rates. In this thesis, instead of focusing on improving specific tasks as it is frequent in the literature, we present a global approach to the problem. Such a global overview starts by the proposal of a generic architecture to be used as a framework both to review the literature and to organize the studied techniques along the thesis. We then focus the research on tasks such as foreground segmentation, object classification and refinement following a general viewpoint and exploring aspects that are not usually analyzed. In order to perform the experiments, we also present a novel pedestrian dataset that consists of three subsets, each one addressed to the evaluation of a different specific task in the system. The results presented in this thesis not only end with a proposal of a pedestrian detection system but also go one step beyond by pointing out new insights, formalizing existing and proposed algorithms, introducing new techniques and evaluating their performance, which we hope will provide new foundations for future research in the area.

Abstract: In this work we present a handwritten word spotting approach that takes advantage of the a priori known order of appearance of the query words. Given an ordered sequence of query word instances, the proposed approach performs a
sequence alignment with the words in the target collection. Although the alignment is quite sparse, i.e. the number of words in the database is higher than the query set, the improvement in the overall performance is sensitively higher than isolated word spotting. As application dataset, we use a collection of handwritten marriage licenses taking advantage of the ordered
index pages of family names.

Abstract: he objective of this work is to show the importance of a good line segmentation to obtain better results in the segmentation of words of historical documents. We have used the approach developed by Manmatha and Rothfeder [1] to segment words in old handwritten documents. In their work the lines of the documents are extracted using projections. In this work, we have developed an approach to segment lines more efficiently. The new line segmentation algorithm tackles with skewed, touching and noisy lines, so it is significantly improves word segmentation. Experiments using Spanish documents from the Marriages Database of the Barcelona Cathedral show that this approach reduces the error rate by more than 20%