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: Human detection is a key component in fields such as advanced driving assistance and video surveillance. However, even detecting non-occluded standing humans remains a challenge of intensive research. Finding good features to build human models for further detection is probably one of the most important issues to face. Currently, shape, texture and motion features have deserve extensive attention in the literature. However, color-based features, which are important in other domains (e.g., image categorization), have received much less attention. In fact, the use of RGB color space has become a kind of choice by default. The focus has been put in developing first and second order features on top of RGB space (e.g., HOG and co-occurrence matrices, resp.). In this paper we evaluate the opponent colors (OPP) space as a biologically inspired alternative for human detection. In particular, by feeding OPP space in the baseline framework of Dalal et al. for human detection (based on RGB, HOG and linear SVM), we will obtain better detection performance than by using RGB space. This is a relevant result since, up to the best of our knowledge, OPP space has not been previously used for human detection. This suggests that in the future it could be worth to compute co-occurrence matrices, self-similarity features, etc., also on top of OPP space, i.e., as we have done with HOG in this paper.

Abstract: Among the components of a pedestrian detector, its trained pedestrian classifier is crucial for achieving the desired performance. The initial task of the training process consists in collecting samples of pedestrians and background, which involves tiresome manual annotation of pedestrian bounding boxes (BBs). Thus, recent works have assessed the use of automatically collected samples from photo-realistic virtual worlds. However, learning from virtual-world samples and testing in real-world images may suffer the dataset shift problem. Accordingly, in this paper we assess an strategy to collect samples from the real world and retrain with them, thus avoiding the dataset shift, but in such a way that no BBs of real-world pedestrians have to be provided. In particular, we train a pedestrian classifier based on virtual-world samples (no human annotation required). Then, using such a classifier we collect pedestrian samples from real-world images by detection. After, a human oracle rejects the false detections efficiently (weak annotation). Finally, a new classifier is trained with the accepted detections. We show that this classifier is competitive with respect to the counterpart trained with samples collected by manually annotating hundreds of pedestrian BBs.

Abstract: Vision-based object detectors are crucial for different applications. They rely on learnt object models. Ideally, we would like to deploy our vision system in the scenario where it must operate, and lead it to self-learn how to distinguish the objects of interest, i.e., without human intervention. However, the learning of each object model requires labelled samples collected through a tiresome manual process. For instance, we are interested in exploring the self-training of a pedestrian detector for driver assistance systems. Our first approach to avoid manual labelling consisted in the use of samples coming from realistic computer graphics, so that their labels are automatically available [12]. This would make possible the desired self-training of our pedestrian detector. However, as we showed in [14], between virtual and real worlds it may be a dataset shift. In order to overcome it, we propose the use of unsupervised domain adaptation techniques that avoid human intervention during the adaptation process. In particular, this paper explores the use of the transductive SVM (T-SVM) learning algorithm in order to adapt virtual and real worlds for pedestrian detection (Fig. 1).

Abstract: Image based human detection is of paramount interest due to its potential applications in fields such as advanced driving assistance, surveillance and media analysis. However, even detecting non-occluded standing humans remains a challenge of intensive research. The most promising human detectors rely on classifiers developed in the discriminative paradigm, i.e., trained with labelled samples. However, labeling is a manual intensive step, especially in cases like human detection where it is necessary to provide at least bounding boxes framing the humans for training. To overcome such problem, some authors have proposed the use of a virtual world where the labels of the different objects are obtained automatically. This means that the human models (classifiers) are learnt using the appearance of rendered images, i.e., using realistic computer graphics. Later, these models are used for human detection in images of the real world. The results of this technique are surprisingly good. However, these are not always as good as the classical approach of training and testing with data coming from the same camera, or similar ones. Accordingly, in this paper we address the challenge of using a virtual world for gathering (while playing a videogame) a large amount of automatically labelled samples (virtual humans and background) and then training a classifier that performs equal, in real-world images, than the one obtained by equally training from manually labelled real-world samples. For doing that, we cast the problem as one of domain adaptation. In doing so, we assume that a small amount of manually labelled samples from real-world images is required. To collect these labelled samples we propose a non-standard active learning technique. Therefore, ultimately our human model is learnt by the combination of virtual and real world labelled samples (Fig. 1), which has not been done before. We present quantitative results showing that this approach is valid.