Fast and accurate pedestrian detection using a cascade of multiple features

Abstract

We propose a fast and accurate pedestrian detection framework based on cascaded classifiers with two complementary features. Our pipeline starts with a cascade of weak classifiers using Haar-like features followed by a linear SVM classifier relying on the Co-occurrence Histograms of Oriented Gradients (CoHOG). CoHOG descriptors have a strong classification capability but are extremely high dimensional. On the other hand, Haar features are computationally efficient but not highly discriminative for extremely varying texture and shape information such as pedestrians with different clothing and stances. Therefore, the combination of both classifiers enables fast and accurate pedestrian detection. Additionally, we propose reducing CoHOG descriptor dimensionality using Principle Component Analysis. The experimental results on the DaimlerChrysler benchmark dataset show that we can reach very close accuracy to the CoHOG-only classifier but in less than 1/1000 of its computational cost. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.