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.
Deep learning methods have achieved great successes in pedestrian detection, owing to its ability to learn discriminative features from raw pixels. However, they treat pedestrian detection as a single binary classification task, which may confuse positive with hard negative samples (Fig.1 (a)). To address this ambiguity, this work jointly optimize pedestrian detection with semantic tasks, including pedestrian attributes (e.g. ‘carrying backpack’) and scene attributes (e.g. ‘vehicle’, ‘tree’, and ‘horizontal’). Rather than expensively annotating scene attributes, we transfer attributes information from existing scene segmentation datasets to the pedestrian dataset, by proposing a novel deep model to learn high-level features from multiple tasks and multiple data sources. Since distinct tasks have distinct convergence rates and data from different datasets have different distributions, a multi-task deep model is carefully designed to coordinate tasks and reduce discrepancies among datasets. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on the challenging Caltech [9] and ETH [10] datasets where it reduces the miss rates of previous deep models by 17 and 5.5 percent, respectively. Paper-by-paper results make it easy to miss the forest for the trees.We analyse the remarkable progress of the last decade by dis- cussing the main ideas explored in the 40+ detectors currently present in the Caltech pedestrian detection benchmark. We observe that there exist three families of approaches, all currently reaching similar detec- tion quality. Based on our analysis, we study the complementarity of the most promising ideas by combining multiple published strategies. This new decision forest detector achieves the current best known performance on the challenging Caltech-USA dataset. Feature extraction, deformation handling, occlusion handling, and classification are four important components in pedestrian detection. Existing methods learn or design these components either individually or sequentially. The interaction among these components is not yet well explored. This paper proposes that they should be jointly learned in order to maximize their strengths through cooperation. We formulate these four components into a joint deep learning framework and propose a new deep network architecture. By establishing automatic, mutual interaction among components, the deep model achieves a 9 reduction in the average miss rate compared with the current best-performing pedestrian detection approaches on the largest Caltech benchmark dataset. In this paper we study the use of convolutional neural networks (convnets) for the task of pedestrian detection. Despite their recent diverse successes, convnets historically underperform compared to other pedestrian detectors. We deliberately omit explicitly modelling the problem into the network (e.g. parts or occlusion modelling) and show that we can reach competitive performance without bells and whistles. In a wide range of experiments we analyse small and big convnets, their architectural choices, parameters, and the influence of different training data, including pretraining on surrogate tasks. We present the best convnet detectors on the Caltech and KITTI dataset. On Caltech our convnets reach top performance both for the Caltech1x and Caltech10x training setup. Using additional data at training time our strongest convnet model is competitive even to detectors that use additional data (optical flow) at test time. Pedestrian detection is of crucial importance to autonomous driving applications. Methods based on deep learning have shown significant improvements in accuracy, which makes them particularly suitable for applications, such as pedestrian detection, where reducing the miss rate is very important. Although they are accurate, their runtime has been at best in seconds per image, which makes them not practical for onboard applications. We present a Large-Field-Of-View (LFOV) deep network for pedestrian detection, that can achieve high accuracy and is designed to make deep networks work faster for detection problems. The idea of the proposed Large-Field-of-View deep network is to learn to make classification decisions simultaneously and accurately at multiple locations. The LFOV network processes larger image areas at much faster speeds than typical deep networks have been able to, and can intrinsically reuse computations. Our pedestrian detection solution, which is a combination of a LFOV network and a standard deep network, works at 280 ms per image on GPU and achieves 35.85 average miss rate on the Caltech Pedestrian Detection Benchmark.