Abstract: The most relevant modules of a pedestrian detector are the candidate generation and the candidate classification. The former aims at presenting image windows to the latter so that they are classified as containing a pedestrian or not. Much attention has being paid to the classification module, while candidate generation has mainly relied on (multiscale) sliding window pyramid. However, candidate generation is critical for achieving real-time. In this paper we assume a context of autonomous driving based on stereo vision. Accordingly, we evaluate the effect of taking into account the 3D information (derived from the stereo) in order to prune the hundred of thousands windows per image generated by classical pyramidal sliding window. For our study we use a multimodal (RGB, disparity) and multi-descriptor (HOG, LBP, HOG+LBP) holistic ensemble based on linear SVM. Evaluation on data from the challenging KITTI benchmark suite shows the effectiveness of using 3D information to dramatically reduce the number of candidate windows, even improving the overall pedestrian detection accuracy.

Abstract: Image based human detection is of paramount interest for different applications. The most promising human detectors rely on discriminatively learnt classifiers, i.e., trained with labelled samples. However, labelling is a manual intensive task, 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, in Marin et al. we 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 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 and the same type of scenario. Accordingly, in Vazquez et al. we cast the problem as one of supervised 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 use an active learning technique. Thus, ultimately our human model is learnt by the combination of virtual- and real-world labelled samples which, to the best of our knowledge, was not done before. Here, we term such combined space cool world. In this extended abstract we summarize our proposal, and include quantitative results from Vazquez et al. showing its validity.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new data-driven approach for binary descriptor selection. In order to draw a clear analysis of common designs, we present a general information-theoretic selection paradigm. It encompasses several standard binary descriptor construction schemes, including a recent state-of-the-art one named BOLD. We pursue the same endeavor to increase the stability of the produced descriptors with respect to rotations. To achieve this goal, we have designed a novel offline selection criterion which is better adapted to the online matching procedure. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on two standard datasets, where our descriptor is compared to BOLD and to several classical descriptors. In particular, it emerges that our approach can reproduce equivalent if not better performance as BOLD while relying on twice shorter descriptors. Such an improvement can be influential for real-time applications.