Abstract: Avoiding vehicle-to-pedestrian crashes is a critical requirement for nowadays advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) and future self-driving vehicles. Accordingly, detecting pedestrians from raw sensor data has a history of more than 15 years of research, with vision playing a central role.
During the last years, deep learning has boosted the accuracy of image-based pedestrian detectors.
However, detection is just the first step towards answering the core question, namely is the vehicle going to crash with a pedestrian provided preventive actions are not taken? Therefore, knowing as soon as possible if a detected pedestrian has the intention of crossing the road ahead of the vehicle is
essential for performing safe and comfortable maneuvers that prevent a crash. However, compared to pedestrian detection, there is relatively little literature on detecting pedestrian intentions. This paper aims to contribute along this line by presenting a new vision-based approach which analyzes the
pose of a pedestrian along several frames to determine if he or she is going to enter the road or not. We present experiments showing 750 ms of anticipation for pedestrians crossing the road, which at a typical urban driving speed of 50 km/h can provide 15 additional meters (compared to a pure pedestrian detector) for vehicle automatic reactions or to warn the driver. Moreover, in contrast with state-of-the-art methods, our approach is monocular, neither requiring stereo nor optical flow information.

Abstract: A key topic in classification is the accuracy loss produced when the data distribution in the training (source) domain differs from that in the testing (target) domain. This is being recognized as a very relevant problem for many
computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and object category recognition. In this paper, we present a novel domain adaptation method that leverages multiple target domains (or sub-domains) in a hierarchical adaptation tree. The core idea is to exploit the commonalities and differences of the jointly considered target domains.
Given the relevance of structural SVM (SSVM) classifiers, we apply our idea to the adaptive SSVM (A-SSVM), which only requires the target domain samples together with the existing source-domain classifier for performing the desired adaptation. Altogether, we term our proposal as hierarchical A-SSVM (HA-SSVM).
As proof of concept we use HA-SSVM for pedestrian detection, object category recognition and face recognition. In the former we apply HA-SSVM to the deformable partbased model (DPM) while in the rest HA-SSVM is applied to multi-category classifiers. We will show how HA-SSVM is effective in increasing the detection/recognition accuracy with respect to adaptation strategies that ignore the structure of the target data. Since, the sub-domains of the target data are not always known a priori, we shown how HA-SSVM can incorporate sub-domain discovery for object category recognition.

Abstract: Pedestrian detection for autonomous driving is one of the hardest tasks within computer vision, and involves huge computational costs. Obtaining acceptable real-time performance, measured in frames per second (fps), for the most advanced algorithms is nowadays a hard challenge. Taking the work in [1] as our baseline, we propose a CUDA implementation of a pedestrian detection system that includes LBP and HOG as feature descriptors and SVM and Random forest as classifiers. We introduce significant algorithmic adjustments and optimizations to adapt the problem to the NVIDIA GPU architecture. The aim is to deploy a real-time system providing reliable results.

Abstract: Vision-based semantic segmentation in urban scenarios is a key functionality for autonomous driving. The irruption of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) allows to foresee obtaining reliable classifiers to perform such a visual task. However, DCNNs require to learn many parameters from raw images; thus, having a sufficient amount of diversified images with this class annotations is needed. These annotations are obtained by a human cumbersome labour specially challenging for semantic segmentation, since pixel-level annotations are required. In this paper, we propose to use a virtual world for automatically generating realistic synthetic images with pixel-level annotations. Then, we address the question of how useful can be such data for the task of semantic segmentation; in particular, when using a DCNN paradigm. In order to answer this question we have generated a synthetic diversified collection of urban images, named SynthCity, with automatically generated class annotations. We use SynthCity in combination with publicly available real-world urban images with manually provided annotations. Then, we conduct experiments on a DCNN setting that show how the inclusion of SynthCity in the training stage significantly improves the performance of the semantic segmentation task

Abstract: We propose a real-time pedestrian detection system for the embedded Nvidia Tegra X1 GPU-CPU hybrid platform. The pipeline is composed by the following state-of-the-art algorithms: Histogram of Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features extracted from the input image; Pyramidal Sliding Window technique for foreground segmentation; and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification. Results show a 8x speedup in the target Tegra X1 platform and a better performance/watt ratio than desktop CUDA platforms in study.

Abstract: Despite recent significant advances, object detection continues to be an extremely challenging problem in real scenarios. In order to develop a detector that successfully operates under these conditions, it becomes critical to leverage upon multiple cues, multiple imaging modalities, and a strong multiview (MV) classifier that accounts for different object views and poses. In this paper, we provide an extensive evaluation that gives insight into how each of these aspects (multicue, multimodality, and strong MV classifier) affect accuracy both individually and when integrated together. In the multimodality component, we explore the fusion of RGB and depth maps obtained by high-definition light detection and ranging, a type of modality that is starting to receive increasing attention. As our analysis reveals, although all the aforementioned aspects significantly help in improving the accuracy, the fusion of visible spectrum and depth information allows to boost the accuracy by a much larger margin. The resulting detector not only ranks among the top best performers in the challenging KITTI benchmark, but it is built upon very simple blocks that are easy to implement and computationally efficient.

Abstract: Dense, robust and real-time computation of depth information from stereo-camera systems is a computationally demanding requirement for robotics, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles. Semi-Global Matching (SGM) is a widely used algorithm that propagates consistency constraints along several paths across the image. This work presents a real-time system producing reliable disparity estimation results on the new embedded energy efficient GPU devices. Our design runs on a Tegra X1 at 42 frames per second (fps) for an image size of 640x480, 128 disparity levels, and using 4 path directions for the SGM method.