Abstract: On–board pedestrian detection is in the frontier of the state–of–the–art since it implies processing outdoor scenarios from a mobile platform and searching for aspect–changing objects in cluttered urban environments. Most promising approaches include the development of classifiers based on feature selection and machine learning. However, they use a large number of features which compromises real–time. Thus, methods for running the classifiers in only a few image windows must be provided. In this paper we contribute in both aspects, proposing a camera
pose estimation method for adaptive sparse image sampling, as well as a classifier for pedestrian detection based on Haar wavelets and edge orientation histograms as features and AdaBoost as learning machine. Both proposals are compared with relevant approaches in the literature, showing comparable results but reducing processing time by four for the sampling tasks and by ten for the classification one.

Abstract: Despite recent significant advances, pedestrian 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 multi-view classifier that accounts for different pedestrian views and poses. In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation that gives insight into how each of these aspects (multi-cue, multimodality and strong multi-view classifier) affect performance both individually and when integrated together. In the multimodality component we explore the fusion of RGB and depth maps obtained by high-definition LIDAR, a type of modality that is only recently starting to receive attention. As our analysis reveals, although all the aforementioned aspects significantly help in improving the performance, 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. These simple blocks can be easily replaced with more sophisticated ones recently proposed, such as the use of convolutional neural networks for feature representation, to further improve the accuracy.

Abstract: Our demo focuses on showing the extraordinary performance of our novel 3D pedestrian detector along with its simplicity and real-time capabilities. This detector has been designed for autonomous driving applications, but it can also be applied in other scenarios that cover both outdoor and indoor applications.
Our pedestrian detector is based on the combination of a random forest classifier with HOG-LBP features and the inclusion of a preprocessing stage based on 3D scene information in order to precisely determinate the image regions where the detector should search for pedestrians. This approach ends up in a high accurate system that runs real-time as it is required by many computer vision and robotics applications.

Abstract: This chapter describes a robust approach for detecting moving objects from on-board stereo vision systems. It relies on a feature point quaternion-based registration, which avoids common problems that appear when computationally expensive iterative-based algorithms are used on dynamic environments. The proposed approach consists of three main stages. Initially, feature points are extracted and tracked through consecutive 2D frames. Then, a RANSAC based approach is used for registering two point sets, with known correspondences in the 3D space. The computed 3D rigid displacement is used to map two consecutive 3D point clouds into the same coordinate system by means of the quaternion method. Finally, moving objects correspond to those areas with large 3D registration errors. Experimental results show the viability of the proposed approach to detect moving objects like vehicles or pedestrians in different urban scenarios.

Abstract: State-of-the-art object detectors typically use shape information as a low level feature representation to capture the local structure of an object. This paper shows that early fusion of shape and color, as is popular in image classification,
leads to a significant drop in performance for object detection. Moreover, such approaches also yields suboptimal results for object categories with varying importance of color and shape.
In this paper we propose the use of color attributes as an explicit color representation for object detection. Color attributes are compact, computationally efficient, and when combined with traditional shape features provide state-ofthe-
art results for object detection. Our method is tested on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2009 datasets and results clearly show that our method improves over state-of-the-art techniques despite its simplicity. We also introduce a new dataset consisting of cartoon character images in which color plays a pivotal role. On this dataset, our approach yields a significant gain of 14% in mean AP over conventional state-of-the-art methods.