Detection of Target Persons Using Deep Learning and Training Data Generation for Tsukuba Challenge

The Tsukuba Challenge is an open experiment competition held annually since 2007, and wherein the autonomous navigation robots developed by the participants must navigate through an urban setting in which pedestrians and cyclists are present. One of the required tasks in the Tsukuba Challenge from 2013 to 2017 was to search for persons wearing designated clothes within the search area. This is a very difficult task since it is necessary to seek out these persons in an environment that includes regular pedestrians, and wherein the lighting changes easily because of weather conditions. Moreover, the recognition system must have a light computational cost because of the limited performance of the computer that is mounted onto the robot. In this study, we focused on a deep learning method of detecting the target persons in captured images. The developed detection system was expected to achieve high detection performance, even when small-sized input images were used for deep learning. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed system achieved better performance than an existing object detection network. However, because a vast amount of training data is necessary for deep learning, a method of generating training data to be used in the detection of target persons is also discussed in this paper.