1. A computer implemented method for detecting the presence of one or more pedestrians in the vicinity of the vehicle, comprising the steps of: receiving imagery of a scene from at least one image capturing device; deriving a depth map from the imagery; detecting a plurality of pedestrian candidate regions of interest (ROIs) from the depth map by matching each of the plurality of ROIs with a 3D human shape model; and classifying at least a portion of the candidate ROIs by employing a cascade of classifiers tuned for a plurality of depth bands and trained on a filtered representation of data within the portion of candidate ROIs to determine whether at least one pedestrian is proximal to the vehicle.