Abstract: Our recent work suggests that, thanks to nowadays powerful CNNs, image-based 2D pose estimation is a promising cue for determining pedestrian intentions such as crossing the road in the path of the ego-vehicle, stopping before entering the road, and starting to walk or bending towards the road. This statement is based on the results obtained on non-naturalistic sequences (Daimler dataset), i.e. in sequences choreographed specifically for performing the study. Fortunately, a new publicly available dataset (JAAD) has appeared recently to allow developing methods for detecting pedestrian intentions in naturalistic driving conditions; more specifically, for addressing the relevant question is the pedestrian going to cross? Accordingly, in this paper we use JAAD to assess the usefulness of 2D pose estimation for answering such a question. We combine CNN-based pedestrian detection, tracking and pose estimation to predict the crossing action from monocular images. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-ofthe-art results.

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: Autonomous driving systems require huge amounts of data to train. Manual annotation of this data is time-consuming and prohibitively expensive since it involves human resources. Therefore, active learning emerged as an alternative to ease this effort and to make data annotation more manageable. In this paper, we introduce a novel active learning approach for object detection in videos by exploiting temporal coherence. Our active learning criterion is based on the estimated number of errors in terms of false positives and false negatives. The detections obtained by the object detector are used to define the nodes of a graph and tracked forward and backward to temporally link the nodes. Minimizing an energy function defined on this graphical model provides estimates of both false positives and false negatives. Additionally, we introduce a synthetic video dataset, called SYNTHIA-AL, specially designed to evaluate active learning for video object detection in road scenes. Finally, we show that our approach outperforms active learning baselines tested on two datasets.