Saliency-Based Pedestrian Detection in Far Infrared Images

Night time pedestrian detection is more and more important in advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS). Traditional pedestrian detection algorithms in far infrared (FIR) images lack accuracy and have long processing times. Focusing on this issue, in this paper, a visual saliency-based pedestrian detection algorithm is proposed. First, areas that contain suspected pedestrians are detected using a fusion saliency-based method. Then, the sub-image of the suspected pedestrian is used as an input to a histogram of local intensity difference feature and cross kernel-based support vector machine classifier to make a final determination. Experiments performed using a real FIR road image data set demonstrated that the proposed fusion saliency-based region of interest (ROI) detection method has the largest pedestrian inclusion rate and the smallest ROI proportion compared with three other methods. Besides, compared with existing state-of-the-art pedestrian detection algorithms, the proposed method demonstrates a much higher pedestrian detection rate with a comparably short processing time.