Object detection is an essential task for autonomous robots operating in dynamic and changing environments. A robot should be able to detect objects in the presence of sensor noise that can be induced by changing lighting conditions for cameras and false depth readings for range sensors, especially RGB-D cameras. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel adaptive fusion approach for object detection that learns weighting the predictions of different sensor modalities in an online manner. Our approach is based on a mixture of convolutional neural network (CNN) experts and incorporates multiple modalities including appearance, depth and motion. We test our method in extensive robot experiments, in which we detect people in a combined indoor and outdoor scenario from RGB-D data, and we demonstrate that our method can adapt to harsh lighting changes and severe camera motion blur. Furthermore, we present a new RGB-D dataset for people detection in mixed in- and outdoor environments, recorded with a mobile robot.
There has been a large body of research targeting pedestrian detection in the vision community @cite_14 @cite_3 . For a concise overview of pedestrian detection we refer to a recent discussion by Benenson al @cite_8 . They conclude that improved detection performance has shown to be driven by the design of better features, but also complemented by additional data, such as image context and motion. To demonstrate the quality of features learned by a convolutional neural network, Hosang al @cite_10 reported improved results for pedestrian detection, using pre-trained off-the-shelf CNNs. More recently Angelova al @cite_17 presented a convolutional network architecture that processes larger areas of the RGB input image and detects multiple pedestrians simultaneously, leading to a significant speedup at test time. However, none of these approaches make use of multiple modalities.
@cite_14 @cite_8 @cite_3 @cite_10 @cite_17
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Multispectral pedestrian detection is essential for around-the-clock applications, e.g., surveillance and autonomous driving. We deeply analyze Faster R-CNN for multispectral pedestrian detection task and then model it into a convolutional network (ConvNet) fusion problem. Further, we discover that ConvNet-based pedestrian detectors trained by color or thermal images separately provide complementary information in discriminating human instances. Thus there is a large potential to improve pedestrian detection by using color and thermal images in DNNs simultaneously. We carefully design four ConvNet fusion architectures that integrate two-branch ConvNets on different DNNs stages, all of which yield better performance compared with the baseline detector. Our experimental results on KAIST pedestrian benchmark show that the Halfway Fusion model that performs fusion on the middle-level convolutional features outperforms the baseline method by 11 and yields a missing rate 3.5 lower than the other proposed architectures. 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, multi-modality and strong multi-view classifier) affect performance both individually and when integrated together. In the multi-modality 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. Pedestrian detection based on the combination of convolutional neural network (CNN) and traditional handcrafted features (i.e., HOG+LUV) has achieved great success. In general, HOG+LUV are used to generate the candidate proposals and then CNN classifies these proposals. Despite its success, there is still room for improvement. For example, CNN classifies these proposals by the fully connected layer features, while proposal scores and the features in the inner-layers of CNN are ignored. In this paper, we propose a unifying framework called multi-layer channel features (MCF) to overcome the drawback. It first integrates HOG+LUV with each layer of CNN into a multi-layer image channels. Based on the multi-layer image channels, a multi-stage cascade AdaBoost is then learned. The weak classifiers in each stage of the multi-stage cascade are learned from the image channels of corresponding layer. Experiments on Caltech data set, INRIA data set, ETH data set, TUD-Brussels data set, and KITTI data set are conducted. With more abundant features, an MCF achieves the state of the art on Caltech pedestrian data set (i.e., 10.40 miss rate). Using new and accurate annotations, an MCF achieves 7.98 miss rate. As many non-pedestrian detection windows can be quickly rejected by the first few stages, it accelerates detection speed by 1.43 times. By eliminating the highly overlapped detection windows with lower scores after the first stage, it is 4.07 times faster than negligible performance loss. In this paper, we consider the problem of pedestrian detection in natural scenes. Intuitively, instances of pedestrians with different spatial scales may exhibit dramatically different features. Thus, large variance in instance scales, which results in undesirable large intracategory variance in features, may severely hurt the performance of modern object instance detection methods. We argue that this issue can be substantially alleviated by the divide-and-conquer philosophy. Taking pedestrian detection as an example, we illustrate how we can leverage this philosophy to develop a Scale-Aware Fast R-CNN (SAF R-CNN) framework. The model introduces multiple built-in subnetworks which detect pedestrians with scales from disjoint ranges. Outputs from all of the subnetworks are then adaptively combined to generate the final detection results that are shown to be robust to large variance in instance scales, via a gate function defined over the sizes of object proposals. Extensive evaluations on several challenging pedestrian detection datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SAF R-CNN. Particularly, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Caltech [P. Dollar, C. Wojek, B. Schiele, and P. Perona, “Pedestrian detection: An evaluation of the state of the art,” IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. , vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 743–761, Apr. 2012], and obtains competitive results on INRIA [N. Dalal and B. Triggs, “Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit. , 2005, pp. 886–893], ETH [A. Ess, B. Leibe, and L. V. Gool, “Depth and appearance for mobile scene analysis,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Comput. Vis ., 2007, pp. 1–8], and KITTI [A. Geiger, P. Lenz, and R. Urtasun, “Are we ready for autonomous driving? The KITTI vision benchmark suite,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit ., 2012, pp. 3354–3361].