The University of Texas at Austin

Vision-Based Pedestrian Detection for

Driving Assistance
Marco Perez

Background
The emergence of a set of vehicle capabilities centered around the notion of driver
assistance.
These involve sensor-based systems, which continuously evaluate the surroundings
of a vehicle, displaying relevant information to the driver and sometimes taking
control of the vehicle.
The objective of these systems is to increase the safety, convenience and efficiency
of driving.
Different sensors may provide the eyes and ears of driver assistance systems:

video cameras
radar sensors
laser scanners
ultrasound devices

Vision systems in the visible spectrum seem the most attractive solution.
Video sensors (cameras) provide texture information at very fine angular resolution,
allowing the high degree of discrimination necessary for object recognition (lanes,
vehicles, pedestrians, traffic signs, traffic lights).
The human visual system is the best example of what performance may be achieved
with such sensors, if only the appropriate processing is added.

Background
Visual detection of pedestrians from a
moving vehicle
The objective is to detect dangerous situations
involving pedestrians ahead of time.
A challenging problem for the following reasons:
Pedestrians appear in highly cluttered/uncontrolled backgrounds.
In order to obtain interesting foreground regions containing
pedestrians, it is not possible to apply common background
subtraction methods due to the moving camera.
Wide range of appearances (body size, pose, clothing, light
conditions).
Sometimes pedestrians will be far away from the camera,
appearing small in the image (at low resolution).

Key Paper #1
(Zhao & Thorpe, 2000)
It runs in real-time.
Employs a stereo vision system to provide range
information for foreground/background segmentation.
Only concerned about objects close to the vehicle.
Hence, detected background objects are eliminated
from the disparity map by range thresholding.
Small regions are eliminated through size thresholding.
The size range of a normal person is obtained from
statistic data.
Sub-images are converted to intensity gradient to
encode shape information.
Intensity gradient images are inputs of a trained (backpropagation) neural network for pedestrian
recognition:
5318 training data: 1012 of pedestrians and 4306 of
objects.

Experiments performed on a large number of urban

street scenes:
Detection rate: 85.2%
False alarm rate: 3.1%

Key Paper #2
(Gavrila, Giebel & Munder 2004)

Template matching based on

contour features to find
candidate solutions.
Shape matching based on
Distance Transforms.
A verification method based on
a Radial Basis Function is used
to dismiss false positives.
Experimental results on
pedestrian detection off-line
and in real time.

Key Paper #3
(Bertozzi, Broggi, Fascioli, Tibaldi, Chapuis & Chausse, 2004)

Recognizes pedestrians in different

environments and localizes them
with the use of a Kalman filter
estimator configured as a tracker.
Pedestrians are first recognized
through the use of edge density and
symmetry maps.
The former information is passed
on to the tracker module which
reconstructs an interpretation of the
pedestrian positions in the scene