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International Journal of Computer Vision 73(1), 41–59, 2007 c 2007 Springer Science + Business Media, LLC. Manufactured in the United States. DOI: 10.1007/s11263-006-9038-7 Multi-cue Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from a Moving Vehicle D. M. GAVRILA Machine Perception, DaimlerChrysler Research and Development, 89081 Ulm, Germany; Intelligent Systems Lab, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands [email protected] S. MUNDER Machine Perception, DaimlerChrysler Research and Development, 89081 Ulm, Germany [email protected] Received June 5, 2005; Revised December 22, 2005; Accepted May 4, 2006 First online version published in July, 2006 Abstract. This paper presents a multi-cue vision system for the real-time detection and tracking of pedestrians from a moving vehicle. The detection component involves a cascade of modules, each utilizing complementary visual criteria to successively narrow down the image search space, balancing robustness and efficiency considera- tions. Novel is the tight integration of the consecutive modules: (sparse) stereo-based ROI generation, shape-based detection, texture-based classification and (dense) stereo-based verification. For example, shape-based detection activates a weighted combination of texture-based classifiers, each attuned to a particular body pose. Performance of individual modules and their interaction is analyzed by means of Receiver Operator Characteristics (ROCs). A sequential optimization technique allows the successive combination of individual ROCs, providing opti- mized system parameter settings in a systematic fashion, avoiding ad-hoc parameter tuning. Application-dependent processing constraints can be incorporated in the optimization procedure. Results from extensive field tests in difficult urban traffic conditions suggest system performance is at the leading edge. Keywords: multiple visual cues, pedestrian detection, intelligent vehicles 1. Introduction Our long term aim is to develop video-based driver assistance systems for the detection of potentially dan- gerous situations with pedestrians, in order to either warn the driver, or, if no such time remains, initiate appropriate protective measures (e.g. automatic vehi- cle braking). See Fig. 1. The use of video sensors comes quite natural for this problem; they provide tex- ture information at fine horizontal and vertical reso- lution, which in turn enables the use of discrimina- tive pattern recognition techniques for distinguishing pedestrians from other static and dynamic objects in the traffic environment. The human visual perception system is perhaps the best example of what perfor- mance might be possible with such sensors, if only the appropriate processing were used. Yet the pedestrian application is very challenging from machine vision perspective. It combines the difficulties of a moving camera, a wide range of possible (deformable) object appearances, cluttered backgrounds, stringent perfor- mance criteria and hard real-time constraints.

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Page 1: Multi-cue Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from a Moving Vehicle · 2007-07-20 · Multi-cue Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from a Moving Vehicle D. M. GAVRILA Machine Perception,

International Journal of Computer Vision 73(1), 41–59, 2007

c© 2007 Springer Science + Business Media, LLC. Manufactured in the United States.

DOI: 10.1007/s11263-006-9038-7

Multi-cue Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from a Moving Vehicle

D. M. GAVRILAMachine Perception, DaimlerChrysler Research and Development, 89081 Ulm, Germany;

Intelligent Systems Lab, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The [email protected]

S. MUNDERMachine Perception, DaimlerChrysler Research and Development, 89081 Ulm, Germany

[email protected]

Received June 5, 2005; Revised December 22, 2005; Accepted May 4, 2006

First online version published in July, 2006

Abstract. This paper presents a multi-cue vision system for the real-time detection and tracking of pedestriansfrom a moving vehicle. The detection component involves a cascade of modules, each utilizing complementaryvisual criteria to successively narrow down the image search space, balancing robustness and efficiency considera-tions. Novel is the tight integration of the consecutive modules: (sparse) stereo-based ROI generation, shape-baseddetection, texture-based classification and (dense) stereo-based verification. For example, shape-based detectionactivates a weighted combination of texture-based classifiers, each attuned to a particular body pose.

Performance of individual modules and their interaction is analyzed by means of Receiver Operator Characteristics(ROCs). A sequential optimization technique allows the successive combination of individual ROCs, providing opti-mized system parameter settings in a systematic fashion, avoiding ad-hoc parameter tuning. Application-dependentprocessing constraints can be incorporated in the optimization procedure.

Results from extensive field tests in difficult urban traffic conditions suggest system performance is at the leadingedge.

Keywords: multiple visual cues, pedestrian detection, intelligent vehicles

1. Introduction

Our long term aim is to develop video-based driverassistance systems for the detection of potentially dan-gerous situations with pedestrians, in order to eitherwarn the driver, or, if no such time remains, initiateappropriate protective measures (e.g. automatic vehi-cle braking). See Fig. 1. The use of video sensorscomes quite natural for this problem; they provide tex-ture information at fine horizontal and vertical reso-lution, which in turn enables the use of discrimina-

tive pattern recognition techniques for distinguishingpedestrians from other static and dynamic objects inthe traffic environment. The human visual perceptionsystem is perhaps the best example of what perfor-mance might be possible with such sensors, if only theappropriate processing were used. Yet the pedestrianapplication is very challenging from machine visionperspective. It combines the difficulties of a movingcamera, a wide range of possible (deformable) objectappearances, cluttered backgrounds, stringent perfor-mance criteria and hard real-time constraints.

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42 Gavrila and Munder

Figure 1. Driver inattention can instantly lead to dangerous situa-

tions with pedestrians.

The outline of the paper is as follows. Section 2discusses previous work in this area. As will becomeapparent, a multitude of interesting approaches havebeen proposed in the literature, mostly focusing on sub-problems (i.e. detection vs. tracking, lateral gait). Yetthere has been comparatively little effort spent on howto effectively integrate multiple visual cues in an overalldetection and tracking system, as guided by quantita-tive system (component) analysis. Furthermore, therehave been few instances in which presented conceptswere backed up by extensive experimental validation.

Section 3 presents the proposed pedestrian systemcalled PROTECTOR. The detection component in-volves a cascade of modules, each utilizing comple-mentary visual criteria to successively narrow downthe image search space, balancing robustness and ef-ficiency considerations. Four detection modules areconsidered: (sparse) stereo-based ROI generation,shape-based detection, texture-based classification and(dense) stereo-based verification. These are comple-mented by a tracking module. We only provide shortdescriptions of the individual modules, as most weredescribed previously. We focus instead on explainingwhy certain modules were selected and how they wereintegrated in the overall system. Among others, wecover a novel mixture-of-experts architecture, involv-ing several texture-based component classifiers, whichare weighted by the outcome of shape matching.

We obtain quantitative insights in the performanceof the independent modules and their interaction onthe basis of Receiver Operator Characteristics (ROCs).Section 4 describes a system parameter optimizationtechnique to incrementally combine individual ROCsinto an overall optimized ROC. After choosing in the

latter an application-dependent ROC point, this methodallows to automatically determine the suitable moduleparameter settings. Any application-specific bound oncomputational cost can be incorporated as a hard con-straint in the optimization procedure. This systemati-cal approach to parameter optimization is undoubtedlypreferable to trial-and-error parameter tuning, so fre-quently employed previously.

Section 5 introduces a methodology for the valida-tion of an integrated pedestrian detection and trackingsystem. Quantitative performance results of the pro-posed PROTECTOR system are presented based onmany thousands of images from driving in real urbantraffic. Illustrating the benefit of the stereo vision mod-ule, we compare the PROTECTOR system with a monoversion. Section 6 puts the resulting system perfor-mance in context to that of other published systems andlists possible improvements. We conclude in Section 7.

Although we primarily cover people detection in thecontext of intelligent vehicles, the presented techniquescould also be adapted to other important domains, suchas surveillance or service robots.

2. Previous Work

Many interesting approaches for pedestrian detectionhave been proposed, for a survey see (Gavrila, 2001).Most work has pursued a learning-based approach, by-passing a pose recovery step and describing human ap-pearance directly in terms of simple low-level featuresfrom a region of interest (ROI).

A number of ways exist to obtain such ROIs. Stan-dard background subtraction, as frequently used insurveillance applications, is unsuitable because of themoving camera. Viable alternatives include slidingwindows, detection of independently moving objects,and stereo-based obstacle detection.

The sliding window approach shifts ROI windowsof all possible sizes, at all locations over the imageswhile performing feature extraction and pattern clas-sification. The brute-force approach in combinationwith powerful classifiers (i.e. Mohan et al., 2001; Pa-pageorgiou and Poggio, 2000; Zhao and Thorpe, 2000)is currently computationally too intensive for real-time application. Recently however, Viola et al. (2005)demonstrated an efficient variant of the sliding win-dow technique, which involves a detector cascade us-ing simple appearance and motion filters (similar tothe Haar-wavelets). Simpler detectors, with a smallernumber of features, are placed earlier in the cascade

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Multi-cue Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from a Moving Vehicle 43

and more complex detectors later. At each detectorstage, AdaBoost (Duda et al., 2001) incrementally se-lects those features with the lowest weighted error onthe training set, until a user-supplied correct and false-detection rate is achieved on a validation set.

Another approach for obtaining ROIs involves de-tecting independently moving objects in monocularimages. This approach typically assumes translatorycamera motion and detects deviations in the opti-cal flow field from the expected background mo-tion (Elzein et al., 2003; Polana and Nelson, 1994;Thompson and Pong, 1990).

A third effective approach for obtaining ROIs is bystereo vision. Zhao and Thorpe (2000) obtain a fore-ground region by clustering in the disparity space.Broggi et al. (2003) and Grubb et al. (2004) considerthe x- and y-projections of the disparity space followingthe ‘V-disparity’ technique (Labayrade et al., 2002).

Once ROIs have been established, different combi-nations of features and pattern classifiers can be appliedto make the distinction between pedestrian and non-pedestrian. For example, Broggi et al. (2004) employvertical symmetry features. Zhao and Thorpe (2000)apply a high-pass filter and normalize the ROI forsize, thereafter applying a feed-forward neural net-work. Papageorgiou and Poggio (2000) pioneered theuse of Haar-wavelet features in combination with aSupport Vector Machine (SVM); this approach wassubsequently adapted by Elzein et al. (2003) and others.

Component-based approaches have been utilizedto reduce the complexity of pedestrian classification.Shashua et al. (2004), for instance, extract a featurevector from each of 9 fixed sub-regions. Other ap-proaches attempt to directly identify certain body parts.Mohan et al. (2001), for example, extend the work ofPapageorgiou and Poggio (2000) to four componentclassifiers for detecting heads, legs, and left/right armsseparately. Individual results are combined by a sec-ond classifier, after ensuring proper geometrical con-straints. Very recently, additional attempts have beenmade towards reducing classification complexity bymanually separating the pedestrian training set in non-overlapping sub-sets (i.e. based on pedestrian headingdirection) Shashua et al. (2004), Grubb et al. (2004),and Shimizu and Poggio (2004).

There has been separately extensive work on pedes-trian tracking. Representations such as Active ShapeModels (Baumberg and Hogg, 1994; Cootes et al.,1995; Philomin et al., 2000), shape exemplars (Stengeret al., 2003; Toyama and Blake, 2001) and color

blobs (Heisele and Wohler, 1998) have been combinedwith Kalman- (Baumberg and Hogg, 1994; Cooteset al., 1995) or particle filtering (Philomin et al., 2000;Stenger et al., 2003; Toyama and Blake, 2001) ap-proaches. Given temporal ROI data, previous work hasdetected people walking laterally to the viewing di-rection, either using the periodicity cue (Cutler andDavis, 2000; Polana and Nelson, 1994) or by learn-ing the characteristic lateral gait pattern (Heisele andWohler, 1998).

Orthogonal to the above, there has been increasedinterest in the FIR domain (Broggi et al., 2004; Fanget al., 2003; Liu and Fujimura, 2003) driven by thearrival of cheaper, uncooled cameras. Detecting pedes-trians by their body heat is attractive, certainly whenconsidering images shot on a cold winter night, wherethe pedestrians stick out as white regions before a blackbackground. However, the situation is less appealing onsunny summer days, when there is an abundance of ad-ditional hot spots. In the latter case, one needs to resortto a similar set of detection techniques as in the visibledomain.

Table 1 summarizes the main pedestrian detectionsystems, distinguished by image sensor type, area ofcoverage, detection performance, use of tracking, pro-cessing speed and test set, where-ever specified by therespective authors. As we will discuss in Section 6, per-formance comparisons are hazardous, since data setsare typically small (and diverse) (Mohan et al., 2001),Papageorgiou and Poggio (2000), Viola et al. (2005),Zhao and Thorpe (2000) and often relate to single com-putational components (e.g. classification). Even wheretest data is more abundant, many important test criteriaremain unspecified (e.g. exact coverage area, localiza-tion tolerances, data assignment rule). The latter moti-vates us to spell out a more detailed test methodology(Section 5.1).

The issue of automatic system parameter optimiza-tion has so far not been covered in the context of pedes-trian detection, to our knowledge. A large body of lit-erature exists on numerical methods dealing with theminimization of non-linear objective functions. Suchapproaches are impractical for the given problem ofoptimizing a complex system, because (a) a single eval-uation of the objective function is computationally ex-pensive, and (b) the number of parameters involved isrelatively high. As a way out, authors have either triedto model system behavior by simpler functions, e.g.Bayesian networks (Sarkar and Chavali, 2000), or de-veloped specialized solutions for the particular problem

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44 Gavrila and Munder

Table 1. Overview of current pedestrian detection systems. Detection performance derived by visual inspection of ROC graphs in respective

publications (approximation). “f.pos.” denotes false positives.

Sensor Coverage Detection Performance Tracking Processing

Authors type area (per frame) (per trajectory) speed Test set

Papageorgiou mono, – 70% correct, 0.15 f.pos. no 20 min 123 ped. images,

and Poggio visible (full set color wavelets) (200 MHz PC) 50 non-ped.

(2000) 70% correct, 3 f.pos. 10 Hz images

(red. grey wavelet set)

Mohan et al. mono, – 85% correct, 0.03 f.pos no – 123 ped. images

(2001) visible 50 non-ped

images

Viola et al. mono, – 80% correct, 0.5 f.pos no 4 Hz 2 sequences

(2005) visible (2.8 GHz PC) of 2000 images

(stat. camera)

Elzein et al. mono, – 69% correct, no 95s 16 ped. images +(2003) visible 61% precision (500 MHz PC) few sequences

Shashua mono, 3–25 m 96% correct, 5.6 × 10−6 f.pos yes 10 Hz 1–5 hrs

et al. visible (inward moving) urban drive

(2004) 93% correct, 8.3 × 10−5 f.pos

(stationary in-path)

85% correct, 2.9 × 10−3 f.pos

(stationary out-path)

Zhao and stereo, – 85% correct, 3% f.pos no 3–12 Hz –

Thorpe visible (per stereo ROI) (450 MHz PC)

(2000)

Bertozzi et al. stereo, – 83% correct, 0.46 f.pos no – 1500 images,

(2004) visible 1897 ped. instances

Grubb et al. stereo, – 84% correct, 0.004 f.pos yes 23 Hz 2500 images,

(2004) visible (2.4 GHz PC) 14 different peds.

Gavrila and stereo, 10–25m 61–81% correct, 78–100% cor., 3–7 Hz sequence of

Munder visible in front [0.7–23] × 10−3 f.pos 0.3–3.5 f.pos/min 17390 images,

(current up to 4m (speed unoptimized) 694 ped. instances

paper) lateral 59–75% correct, 78–100% cor., 7–15 Hz 17067 non-ped.

[1.0–27] × 10−3 f.pos 0.4–5.1 f.pos/min (2.4 GHz PC) images

(speed optimized)

Fang et al. mono, – 84% correct, 19% f.pos no – 289 ped. images

(2003) FIR (summer)

92% correct, 3% f.pos

(winter)

at hand. Within this work, we aim to exploit the cascadecoupling of system modules.

Cascaded classifiers (Viola et al., 2005) have recentlyreceived increasing interest due to their computationalefficiency, and a number of publications addressed theiroptimization. For example, Sun et al. (2004) and Luo(2005) observed that the overall cascade performanceis optimal if the slope of the log-scale ROC curve isequal for all nodes, given that the individual cascadenodes are statistically independent. No such assump-tion is made by Huo and Chen (2004), who recentlyproposed a ROC “frontier-following” heuristic to suc-cessively adjust the thresholds of a classifier cascade.

The idea of analyzing the optimal front of ROC pointswas first utilized by Provost and Fawcett (2001) in thecontext of classifier comparison. They showed that, forany misclassification costs, the optimal classifiers arelocated on the ROC convex hull. Here, we extend bothideas (Huo and Chen, 2004; Provost and Fawcett, 2001)by developing a technique to sequentially optimize acascade of complex system modules, each controlledby a number of parameters, and by incorporating user-defined constraints.

This paper builds on earlier work described inGavrila et al. (2004). We consider the main contri-butions of this paper the integration of modules in a

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Multi-cue Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from a Moving Vehicle 45

Figure 2. Overview of the PROTECTOR modules. Modules shaded grey depend on stereo imaging. Parameters selected for optimization are

listed under the corresponding module.

multi-cue system for pedestrian detection and tracking(Section 3.2), and furthermore, the systematic proce-dure for parameter setting and system optimization(Section 4).

3. The PROTECTOR System

See Fig. 2 for an overview of the modules of the PRO-TECTOR system. Modules which rely on stereo areshown in shaded grey, they would be discarded in amono version of the system. Figure 2 also lists the mainmodule parameters subject to optimization, as coveredin Section 4.

A first system design consideration involves the useof stereo vision. Shashua et al. (2004), for example,questions the benefit of depth disparity cues for seg-menting out pedestrians in urban traffic due to heavydisparity clutter. Approaches that are overly “bottom-up”, such as those clustering sparse depth (e.g. Zhaoand Thorpe, 2000) or those based on detecting obstaclesusing the V-disparity technique (Broggi et al., 2003;Grubb et al., 2004), indeed tend to break down in suchcluttered scenarios, when pedestrians are not well sep-arated from other objects in the environment and/orwhen road surface is significantly occluded by other ob-stacles. In such cases, pedestrian features are frequentlymerged with other objects in the environment and a sub-sequent pattern classifier has difficulties dealing withthe resulting spatial misalignment. We overcome thisproblem by not relying on depth segmentation, insteadby instantiating “top-down” pedestrian matching basedon the (raw) depth data, see Section 3.2.1. In the experi-ments in complex urban traffic, we show that the stereoversion of PROTECTOR significantly outperforms its

mono variant, as result of the improved foreground-background separation (Section 5).

Another notable design choice, absent in other sys-tems, is the use of a shape detection module prior totexture-based pedestrian classification. Shape is a pow-erful cue for the problem at hand; its property to reducethe variation in pedestrian appearance as induced bylighting or clothing, makes it an appealing “filter” be-fore the use of texture, especially when it involves ahierarchical matching approach which efficiently pro-vides accurate target localization. Moreover, shape in-formation can be used to instantiate pose-specific tex-ture classifiers, for increased recognition performance(Section 3.2.2).

3.1. Individual Modules

3.1.1. Sparse Stereo-Based ROI Generation. Pro-cessing starts with the computation of a disparity mapusing stereo. First step is the rectification of the leftand right camera image using an optimized implemen-tation of Bouguet’s method (Bouguet, 2000). This im-proves the epipolar alignment and reduces the effectsof lens distortion away from the optical center. In orderto allow real-time processing, we use a feature-based,multi-resolution stereo algorithm developed by Franke(2000) (alternate choices would have been possible).The outcome is a relatively sparse disparity map, seeupper left part of Fig. 5.

3.1.2. Shape-Based Detection. We follow anexemplar-based approach to shape-based pedestriandetection, as previously described in Gavrila andPhilomin (1999). Pedestrians are represented by a set

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46 Gavrila and Munder

of training shapes or templates which ideally cover theset of object appearances due to transformations (i.e.scale) and intra-class variance (i.e. different pedestri-ans, different poses). At the core, we perform templatematching based on the (chamfer) distance transform(Borgefors, 1986). This correlation approach isquite robust to missing features due to segmentationproblems (i.e. edge “gaps”) or occlusion. Furthermore,the distance transforms has the advantage to providea gradual measure of shape dissimilarity. This allowsthe use of an efficient search algorithms to “lock onto”the correct solution, as discussed below.

Several thousand of exemplars have been collectedto describe the pedestrian shape distribution. We use atemplate hierarchy to efficiently match whole sets oftemplates, see lower right part of Fig. 5. Offline, thishierarchy is constructed automatically from availableexample templates, in bottom-up, level-by-level fash-ion using clustering. Previous experiments have shownthat a three-level hierarchy is suitable for capturing thepedestrian shape distribution, with number of templatesnodes decreasing an order of magnitude at successivelevels towards the root (Gavrila and Philomin, 1999).

Online, matching involves a depth-first traversal ofthe template tree structure, starting at the root. Eachnode corresponds to matching a (prototype) templatewith the image at particular interest locations (i.e. atvarious template translations). For the locations wherethe (template size-normalized) chamfer distance mea-sure between template and image is below a user-supplied distance threshold Dl , one computes new in-terest locations for the children nodes (generated bysampling the local neighborhood on a finer grid of im-age locations) and adds the children nodes to the list ofnodes to be processed. For locations where the distancemeasure is above this threshold, search does not prop-agate to the sub-tree; it is this pruning capability thatbrings large efficiency gains. Following Gavrila andPhilomin (1999), a single distance threshold Dl appliesfor each level of the hierarchy. An additional parameterEl governs the edge density that is extracted from theoriginal image at that level, which is the basis for theunderlying distance map. The resulting six parametersD1,. . ., D3 and E1,. . ., E3 control the amount of ROIspassed onto the next stage; they are determined auto-matically using the optimization approach described inSection 4.

3.1.3. Texture-Based Pedestrian Classification.Whereas the preceeding module uses shape contours

Table 2. Data sets used for training and testing of the tex-

ture classifier. The data sets have been further increased by

mirroring and shifting the bounding box position in x- and

y-direction by few pixels (accounting for small remaining

localization errors).

Pedestrians Non-Pedestrians

Training set 5752 20434

Test set 4632 24668

to refine and filter the position and pose of candidatepedestrians, the current pattern classification moduleutilizes the richer set of intensity features to makethe distinction pedestrian versus non-pedestrian. Theselection of the particular type of classifier was guidedby the need to represent a complex decision boundaryin high dimensional feature space with only a relativelysmall training set at the disposal, see Table 2 (negativesamples consisted of the false positives of the cascadeup to this point from previous bootstrapping steps(Papageorgiou and Poggio, 2000)).

The SVM (Mohan et al., 2001; Papageorgiou andPoggio, 2000), in combination with PCA for dimen-sionality reduction, fits the above profile, but we de-cided against it after an extensive experimental eval-uation (Munder and Gavrila, 2006) showed its classi-fication performance to be similar yet its processingrequirements to be substantially higher (by half orderof magnitude) than the approach we finally selected: aneural network with local receptive fields (Wohler andAnlauf, 1999). The use of local receptive fields withshared weights reduces the degrees of freedom for thetraining process compared to a fully-connected feed-forward network (Zhao and Thorpe, 2000), allowingrelatively small training sets. As Munder and Gavrila(2006) shows, the network is nevertheless able to cap-ture relevant feature information from a local neigh-borhood.

3.1.4. Dense Stereo-Based Pedestrian Verification.The aim at this stage is to filter out (false) detectionswhich contain an appreciable amount of background.For this, the pedestrian shape template, which gener-ated the candidate solution, is applied as a mask fora dense cross-correlation with the other stereo image.See Fig. 3. Cross-correlation is performed within theparticular disparity range as determined by the esti-mated pedestrian depth (i.e. flat world assumption). Asecond-order polynomial is fitted on the correlation val-ues obtained over this one-dimensional search range. Adetection is accepted only if both the maximum of the

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Multi-cue Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from a Moving Vehicle 47

Figure 3. Stereo Verification: The shape template masks out background pixels for a dense cross-correlation between both stereo images within

a certain disparity search range. A threshold is enforced on both height and spread of the resulting correlation function.

polynomial is above, and the normalized “spread” ofthe polynomial is below a threshold (the latter is a mea-sure of localization confidence). The two associated pa-rameters, H and W , control the amount of ROIs passedonto the next stage; they are determined automaticallyusing the optimization approach described in Section 4.

For some intuition in the above, see Fig. 4. The can-didate solutions shown in black may have passed thestereo, shape and texture module in the cascade. Basedon the ground plane constraint, however, they are esti-mated at 10–15 m in front of the camera. When cross-correlating with the other stereo image with the corre-sponding disparities, matching will not produce a highscore, since the contained background pixels matchbest at markedly lower disparity values (i.e. larger dis-tances).

3.1.5. Tracking. Tracking allows us to overcomegaps in detection, to suppress spurious measurementsand to obtain trajectory information for a subsequentrisk assessment module. Mainly because of computa-tional cost and because shape variations have alreadybeen handled by the detection modules, our trackeris simplified to involve 2.5-D bounding box position

Figure 4. Stereo Verification: Examples of removal of background-

corrupted detections (accepted solutions shown white, rejected

black).

(x, y), extent (w, h), and depth (z), as well as theirderivatives. The depth of a bounding box is determinedfrom stereo vision using the shape template to maskout background pixels. We use a straightforward α-βtracker to estimate the object state parameters.

To deal with non-trivial data associations (i.e. single-measurement multiple-track assignments or vice versa)in an optimal fashion, we use the classical Hungar-ian method (Kuhn, 1955). It operates on a cost matrix,which is built from the similarity between the predic-tion of the tracks and the associated measurements. Assimilarity measure we use a weighted linear combina-tion of Euclidean distance between object centroids andpairwise shape dissimilarity. For the latter, we use thechamfer distance (which was pre-computed off-line forall pairs of shape exemplars in the process of the con-struction of the exemplar hierarchy, see Section 3.1.2).A new track is started whenever a new object appearsin m successive frames and no active track fits to it.It ends, if the object corresponding to an active trackhas not been detected in n successive frames. The twoassociated parameters, m and n, control system output;they are determined automatically using the optimiza-tion approach described in Section 4.

3.2. Module Integration

We aim for a tight integration of modules in Fig. 2,incorporating as much information as possible from aprevious module into the next one, for efficiency andrecognition performance reasons.

3.2.1. Depth and Shape. Figure 5 illustrates how thedepth and shape modules are integrated, while takinginto account the ground plane constraints (i.e. flat worldassumption, pedestrian on the ground). The outcome

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48 Gavrila and Munder

Figure 5. Integration of stereo, shape and ground plane constraints at “hand-over” of obstacle detection to pedestrian classification.

of the stereo module, the disparity map, is multiplexedinto N discrete depth ranges. The associated binaryimages are scanned with windows related to minimumand maximum extents of pedestrians, taking into ac-count the ground plane location at a particular depthrange and appropriate pitch angle tolerances. The lo-cations where the number of (depth) features exceedsa percentage of the window area are added to the ROIlist for the subsequent shape detection module. The twoparameters, pitch angle tolerance ψ and feature densitythreshold δ control the amount of ROIs passed onto thenext stage; they are determined automatically using theoptimization approach described in Section 4.

For a tight integration, the exemplar-based approachof Section 3.1.2 computes separate template hierar-chies corresponding to a discrete set of pedestrian sizes.Links are established off-line between possible ROIwindow sizes/locations and the template hierarchiesof corresponding pedestrian size, allowing an efficientonline “hand-over”. See Fig. 5. A similar technique ap-plies the mono case; this takes into account solely theground plane constraints, without benefitting from thepruning of window locations based on the existence ofsufficient depth features.

3.2.2. Shape and Texture. Texture-based classifica-tion of pedestrians is challenging because of the highvariability of the target class, which arises from threesources: foreground texture (induced by the pedes-trian’s clothing and illumination), shape (body poseand viewing direction), and background texture. Oneapproach to tackle this problem known from the lit-erature is to partition the feature space into regions

of reduced variability, and to train separate classi-fiers, or “local experts” for each sub-region (Jacobset al., 1991). This mixture-of-experts architecture isparticularly suitable for the problem at hand becausepartitioning information is already available from theshape detection module. Hence, instead of trying tolearn a clustering of the texture patterns anew, weexploit the shape matching results as an additionalsource of information for the texture classificationmodule. In order to compensate for shape matchingerrors, as e.g. caused by background clutter, we de-rive a probabilistic assignment of texture patterns toshape clusters, used to weight the results of the individ-ual classifiers. Figure 6 provides an illustration of thisarchitecture.

In Section 3.1.2, a hierarchy of shape templates hasbeen constructed. At the top level, this hierarchy de-fines a partitioning of all underlying shape templatesinto a number of clusters, each roughly representinga distinct body pose. Let Ci , i = 1 . . . K , denote theshape clusters, K being the number of template nodesat the top level of the tree. In order to assign a texturepattern x to a cluster Ci , we define a distance measurebetween x and Ci by

Di (x) = mint∈Ci

DChamfer(t, x), (1)

i.e., the minimum chamfer distance (Borgefors, 1986)over all shape templates t in cluster Ci . By modeling thecluster-conditional density function as an exponentialdistribution,

p(x | Ci ) ∝ αi e−αi Di (x), (2)

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Multi-cue Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from a Moving Vehicle 49

Figure 6. Integration of shape-based localization and texture classification. The shape cluster membership of the matching shape template

determines the weighting of the K classifiers in a mixture-of-experts architecture.

and assuming equal prior probabilities, we derive theprobability of pattern x falling into cluster Ci accordingto Bayes formula as

wi (x) ≡ αi e−αi Di (x)∑Kj=1 α j e−α j D j (x)

≈ P(Ci | x). (3)

Parameters αi are determined on the training set viamaximum likelihood.

One could partition the training set into K disjointsubsets based on these probabilities, and train a sep-arate classifier on each subset. We decided againstit as preliminary experiments have shown degradedperformance, possibly due to wrong sample-to-clusterassignment or the reduced number of training sam-ples remaining in each cluster. Instead, we train Kclassifiers fi on the same full training set, but ap-ply the cluster membership probability wi (x) as aweight to each training example. The output of eachclassifier can be considered as an approximation ofthe posterior probability that pattern x represents apedestrian:

fi (x) ≈ P(pedestrian | Ci , x). (4)

The final classification result is consequently given bythe weighted sum of the cluster classifiers:

F(x) =K∑

i=1

wi (x) fi (x) (5)

≈K∑

i=1

P(Ci | x)P(pedestrian | Ci , x)

= P(pedestrian | x). (6)

Classification result F(x) is compared to a user-supplied threshold C , which controls the amount ofROIs passed onto the next stage. It is determined au-tomatically using the optimization approach describedin Section 4.

Determination of the weights wi (x) is rather time-consuming as it requires the computation of the cham-fer distance of a previously unseen texture pattern to allshape templates (Eqs. (1) and (3)). For online process-ing, we approximate wi (x) by the expectation of theweight vector distribution of samples in the trainingset that fall in that particular cluster:

wji = ED j [wi (x)] (7)

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50 Gavrila and Munder

0.7

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tect

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Texture Classification By Probabilistic Shape-based Clustering

Single Classifier (No Clustering)Classifier Combination (Weights from cluster distances)

Classifier Combination (Approximated Weights)

Figure 7. ROC curves of the texture classification module, determined on the test set. The solid curve shows the performance of the classifier

as given in Eq. (5), whereas approximated weights according to Eq. (7) have been used for the dashed curve. For comparison, ROC performance

for a single classifier without clustering is shown as well.

where

D j = {x ∈ D | j = arg minj ′=1...K

D j ′ (x)} . (8)

In this manner, wji can be pre-computed off-line, and

index j follows online from hierarchical shape match-ing.

Figure 7 illustrates the benefit of the proposedmixture-of-experts architecture. The ensemble of tex-ture classifiers attuned to particular pedestrian posesclearly outperforms the single classifier trained on theentire data set. Furthermore, approximating wi (x) byw

ji does not appreciably affect performance.

4. System Optimization

After having introduced the individual modules, weturn to modeling their interaction and to finding goodoverall parameter settings in a systematic and opti-mized fashion. Figure 2 shows the system modules tobe optimized and their respective parameters. In total,13 parameters which mainly influence system perfor-mance and processing speed have been identified foroptimization. Our optimization objective is the entiresystem ROC curve in order to remain flexible regard-ing the ROC point to be used in a particular application.In order for the outcome to be practically usable, we

integrate the inevitable processing constraints (i.e. av-erage processing time per frame) into the optimizationprocess.

The idea can be sketched as follows: We search overa set of parameters by computing a ROC point, i.e. thefalse positive and the detection rate, for each parametersetting, as illustrated in Fig. 8. After filtering this setof ROC points to meet user-defined constraints, the de-sired system ROC curve is given by its frontier (blackcurve in Fig. 8). For computational reasons, the systemmodules are successively included into the optimiza-tion process.

The theory of the optimization approach is givenin the next subsection, implementation details and theincorporation of constraints are described in Section4.2.

4.1. Sequential Parameter Optimization

We first consider the problem of adjusting the pa-rameters of a cascade of n system modules. Eachmodule represents a classifier that assigns an inputpattern x to either the target or non-target class, de-pending on some parameter vector qi , i = 1,. . ., n,subject to optimization. The output of the entire cas-cade is “target class” if, and only if, all classifiersagree on that decision. If di (x, qi ) ∈ {0, 1} de-

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Multi-cue Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from a Moving Vehicle 51

0

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All ROC PointsSubset of Optimal ROC Points

Figure 8. Illustration of the optimal subset of ROC points: A cloud of ROC points of the texture classification module has been generated by

varying its output threshold as well as the parameters of the preceeding shape detection module, shown by grey crosses. The subset of optimal

ROC points (for this particular module) is depicted by the black curve.

notes the output of the i th classifier where 1 and 0denote the target class and non-target class, respec-tively, then the result of the entire cascade is given byD1:n(x, q1:n) = d1(x, q1)d2(x, q2) . . . dn(x, qn), whereq1:n = (q1,. . ., qn) denotes the concatenation of allparameter vectors. Furthermore, let Qi denote the setof admissible parameter vectors qi , and Q1:n = Q1 ×· · · × Qn .

The performance of the cascade for a given parame-ter vector q1:n is characterized by a pair of false positiverate and corresponding detection (or hit) rate,

F1:n(q1:n)=Pr[D1:n(x, q1:n)=1|non-target pattern x],

H1:n(q1:n)=Pr[D1:n(x, q1:n) = 1|target pattern x],

which represents a point in ROC space. The set Q1:n ofall admissible parameter vectors generates a set of ROCpoints, of which we seek the dominating, or Paretooptimal (Boyd and Vandenbergh, 2004) ones along thefrontier, see Fig. 8 for an illustration. More formally, weseek for the subset Q�

1:n ⊂ Q1:n of parameter vectorsq1:n for which there is no other parameter vector thatoutperforms both, false positive rate and the detectionrate rate: (temporarily dropping subscripts)

Q� ={q ∈ Q | ∀q′∈QF(q′)≥ F(q)∨H (q′)≤ H (q)}.(9)

Performing such an optimization simultaneously forall parameters, however, becomes computationally in-feasible even for a moderate number of cascade nodesand parameters. But suppose the following precon-dition holds: Each (concatenated) parameter vectorq1:i ∈ Q�

1:i optimal for a cascade of nodes 1,. . ., i isalso optimal if only nodes 1,. . ., i − 1 are considered.That is,

q1:i = (q1:i−1, qi ) ∈ Q�1:i ⇒ q1:i−1 ∈ Q�

1:i−1, (10)

for i = 2,. . ., n. Then, the search space Q1:n in Eq. (9)can be restricted to contain the solution Q�

1:n−1 of atruncated cascade. Applying this idea recursively leadsto the method of sequentially computing Q�

1:2, Q�1:3,

. . . , Q�1:n , where the search space Q′

1:i in each step canbe restricted to contain the preceeding solution:

Q′1:i = Q�

1:i−1 × Qi ,

Q�1:i = {q ∈ Q′

1:i | ∀q′∈Q′1:i

F(q′) ≥ F(q) ∨ H (q′)

≤ H (q)}. (11)

It is easy to show that the precondition (10) is metwhen the cascade nodes are independent, i.e. if

F1:n(q1:n) =n∏

i=1

fi (qi ), H1:n(q1:n) =n∏

i=1

hi (qi ),

(12)

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52 Gavrila and Munder

Figure 9. System optimization procedure.

where fi (qi ) denotes the false positive rate of node iwhich is now only affected by its associated parame-ters qi and independent of all others, and analogouslyfor hi (qi ). Substituting F and H in Eq. (9) with theseproducts immediately implies (10). In other words, thesuccessive computation scheme (11) is provably opti-mal if the cascade nodes are independent.

In practice, the cascade nodes are correlated so thatthis procedure is no longer guaranteed to find the globaloptimum. However, there is experimental evidence thatoften, the solution such found is close to optimal. Anexample is given in Section 5.2.

4.2. Implementation

In many applications there are constraints that restrictallowable parameter settings. For example, an (online)application will involve bounds on allowable process-ing speed. For real-time pedestrian detection on-boarda moving vehicle, we place an upper limit on the aver-age processing time per frame.

In general, let a parameter vector q1:i under con-sideration at optimization be required to meet someuser-defined constraint Ci (q1:i ) ≥ 0. Then the searchspace Q′

1:i in Eq. (11) is restricted to those parametervectors that meet the constraint, i.e. it is replaced by

QC1:i = {q1:i ∈ Q′

1:i | Ci (q1:i ) ≥ 0}. (13)

Our particular constraint of limiting the average pro-cessing time per frame is implemented as follows. Atoptimization stage i and parameter q1:i under con-sideration, processing time T consumed

1:i (q1:i ) of modules1,. . ., i can be measured, while the processing time ofthe remaining modules i + 1,. . ., n is estimated to bea linear function of the (average) number of ROIs tobe processed by these modules. The latter is given bythe number of outputs ki (q1:i ) of module i , while the

parameters of the linear model, T fixi+1:n and T obj

i+1:n , aredetermined in advance by linear regression over thetraining set. With T limit denoting the user-defined pro-cessing time limit, Ci is given by

Ci (q1:i ) = T limit − T consumed1:i (q1:i ) − T fix

i+1:n

−ki (q1:i )Tobj

i+1:n. (14)

Two simplifications are made in order for the op-timization algorithm to be computationally feasible.The sets of admissible parameters Qi are required tobe finite, so that Eq. (11) can be implemented as asimple search over the restricted set QC

1:i . Finitenessis achieved via discretization. Secondly, we limit thenumber of ROC points to be considered from the pre-ceeding solution set. At most M ROC points are se-lected from Q�

1:i−1, drawn uniformly along the ROCcurve. The resulting system parameter optimization al-gorithm is listed in Fig. 9.

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Multi-cue Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from a Moving Vehicle 53

Table 3. “Real World” statistics.

Run1 Run2

Total images 21053 17390

Images containing pedestrians 1021 855

Events (pedestrian instances): all/risky 733/112 694/89

Event trajectories: all/risky 45/17 50/10

5. Experiments

We tested the PROTECTOR system on data from ur-ban traffic environment. Two video sequences (Run1and Run2) were recorded on the same route throughsuburbia and inner city of Aachen, Germany, lasting27 min and 24 min, respectively. On the route, tenpedestrian “actors” awaited the system, either stand-ing or crossing at various walking speeds, according toa pre-defined choreography (for both runs the same).In addition, there were the “normal” pedestrians whichhappened to be on the road. The vehicle driver wasrequested to maintain 30 km/h, traffic conditions per-mitting. Statistics for both sequences are shown inTable 3. See Fig. 10 for a view inside the vehicledemonstrator.

Run1 was used to perform the parameter optimiza-tion as described in Section 4, system evaluation wasdone on Run2. None of these sequences was used forthe training process of a system module (as shapeor texture pattern examples), Run1 merely provideda basis for the adaption of our system to the urbanenvironment.

Figure 10. Inside the vehicle demonstrator: stereo cameras visible

lateral to rear-mirror, display for system prototyping.

5.1. Test Methodology

At the core, system evaluation involves comparing en-tries from ground truth with system output, both relatedto 3D object position relative to the vehicle (we pre-fer to evaluate the system in 3D rather than in imagespace, because application-specific considerations canmore easily be described in 3D terms). Ground truthdata is obtained by a human operator diligently label-ing objects in monocular images, and by using sceneknowledge to back-project into 3D. For the case ofpedestrians, the latter means making the “flat world”assumption coupled with the reasonable conjecture thatthe pedestrian feet stand on the ground plane.

In comparing system output and ground truth, weconsider two performance metrics: sensitivity and pre-cision. Sensitivity relates to the percentage of true so-lutions that were found by the system, whereas preci-sion relates to the percentage of system solutions thatwere correct. A sensitivity and precision of 100% isideal: the system finds all real solutions and producesno false positives. For additional insight, we considerthe two performance metrics on both the frame- andtrajectory-level. For the latter, we further distinguishtwo types of trajectories: “class-B” and “class-A” tra-jectories that have at least one entry or at least 50% oftheir entries matched, respectively. Thus, all “class-A”trajectories are also “class-B” trajectories, but “class-A” trajectories pose stronger detection demands thatmight be necessary in some applications. Furthermore,the following items need to be specified.

Sensor Coverage Area. The sensor coverage arearepresents the space surrounding the vehicle where thedefined object detection capability is required. Outsidethis area, we consider detection capability optional inthe sense that the system is not rewarded/penalizedfor correct/false/missing detections. The PROTEC-TOR sensor coverage area is shown in Fig. 11.

Localization Tolerance. Given an object detected bythe system at a certain location (“alarm”), and given atrue object location (“event”), the localization toleranceis the maximum positional deviation that still allows usto count the alarm as a match. This localization toler-ance is the sum of an application-specific component(how precise does the object localization have to be forthe application) and a component related to measure-ment error (how exact can we determine true objectlocation).

For the PROTECTOR field tests, we define objectlocalization tolerance as percentage of distance, for

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54 Gavrila and Munder

Figure 11. PROTECTOR system coverage area.

lateral and longitudinal direction (X and Z ), with re-spect to the vehicle. Regarding the application-specificcomponent, values of Xa = 5% and Za = 15% appearreasonable; for example, this means that, at 20 m dis-tance, we tolerate a localization error of ±1 m and ±3 min the position of the pedestrian, lateral and longitudinalto the vehicle driving direction, respectively. Regard-ing the measurement-specific component, Xm = 5%and Zm = 15% appear necessary (with the larger Zm

value to account for non-flat road surface and/or vehi-cle pitch in case of ground truth by monocular imagelabeling). For the PROTECTOR field tests, we then useoverall tolerances of X = 10% and Z = 30%.

Data Assignment. For the PROTECTOR applicationwe allow many-to-many correspondences. An event isconsidered matched if there is at least one alarm match-ing it. In practice, this means that in the case a group ofpedestrians walking sufficiently close together in frontof the vehicle, the system does not necessarily have todetect all of them in isolation, it suffices if each truepedestrian is within the localization tolerance of a de-tected pedestrian.

5.2. Validation of the Optimization Procedure

The first test aims to validate the system optimizationprocedure described in Section 4 using real-world data.For comparison, we determine the true optimum byexhaustive search of the entire (discretized) parameterspace. In order for this to be computationally feasible,

we select only two out of the five system modules,namely the “Shape-based Detection” and “Texture-based Classification” modules. Furthermore, we fix theparameters of the non-leaf levels of the shape tem-plate hierarchy, so that three system parameters remainfor optimization: the leaf-level edge binarization andchamfer distance thresholds EL and DL , and the clas-sifier output threshold C , see Fig. 2. 11 discrete valuesare chosen for parameter EL , and 100 for DL and C ,so that in total 111, 000 different parameter settingshave to be considered for the exhaustive search, butonly 11 × 100 + 127 × 100 = 13, 800 for the sequen-tial approach, where 127 is the number of ROC pointsobtained in the first optimization step.

In addition, we apply the independent optimizationprocedure described by Luo (2005). Here, we first de-termine a single ROC curve for each of the two systemmodules. Since two parameters are involved for the firstmodule, its ROC curve is computed from the Paretofront, Eq. (9). An overall optimization objective, con-structed by considering log-scale ROC curves and byusing the Lagrange multiplier method, is to minimizelog(F(q)) − λ log(H (q)). By assuming independenceand substituting F and H with Eq. (12), this decom-poses into independent optimization problems, one foreach module, parametrized by the Lagrange multiplierλ. The overall ROC curve is then obtained by varying λ

within the range (0, ∞) and by choosing optimized pa-rameters independently for each module, given by thepoint on their log-scale ROC curve with slope equal toλ.

ROC results for all three methods obtained on theoptimization sequence Run1 are given in Fig. 12. Theperformance of the sequential optimization procedureis almost identical to the optimal ROC curve ob-tained by exhaustive search, whereas results of theindependent optimization approach are considerablydegraded.

5.3. PROTECTOR System Results

We compare three variants of our system: The PRO-TECTOR system as described in Section 3 with andwithout processing time constraint, and a mono sys-tem, without time constraint, where the stereo-relatedmodules have been discarded (Stereo-based ROI Gen-eration and Pedestrian Verification, leaving only theground plane as ROI constraint). The upper bound onaverage processing time was specified at 100 ms.

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Multi-cue Pedestrian Detection and Tracking from a Moving Vehicle 55

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Exhaustive SearchSequential Optimization

Independent Optimization

Figure 12. Comparison of three parameter optimization approaches: Exhaustive search, the sequential optimization method described in

Section 4, and the independent optimization described in Luo (2005).

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Mono, No Time Constraint

Figure 13. ROC curves of 3 configurations: Stereo/Mono system, optimized without processing time constraint, and stereo system optimized

under average processing time constraint of 100 ms.

The system parameter optimization procedure de-scribed in Section 4 is employed for each of the threevariants using sequence Run1. Resulting ROC curvesare shown in Fig. 13. The x- and y-axis denote aver-age number of false detections per image, and frame-level sensitivity, respectively. The ROC point at Sen-

sitivity = 60% has been selected on each of thesecurves for system evaluation, to ensure a commonreference for performance comparison between the 3variants.

Results on the test sequence Run2 are given inTable 4 on the frame and trajectory level. Enforcing

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56 Gavrila and Munder

Table 4. “Real World” Performance for Sequence Run2: “F” denotes frame-level performance, “A”/“B” denote

A-class/B-class trajectory performance, respectively. Numbers of false alarms (FA) are given per 103 frames for

frame-level performance, and per driving minute for trajectory performance.

Stereo Stereo, Time constraint Mono

F A B F A B F A B

Sensitivity (all) 61.0% 62.0% 78.0% 58.8% 64.0% 78.0% 62.8% 68.0% 82.0%

Precision (all) 52.6% 37.2% 38.0% 46.1% 29.1% 30.3% 22.7% 14.3% 15.2%

FA 103 fr, min (all) 23 3.6 3.5 27 5.2 5.1 110 15.3 15.1

Sensitivity (risky) 80.9% 90.0% 100% 75.3% 80.0% 100% 74.2% 80.0% 90.0%

Precision (risky) 83.1% 61.9% 61.9% 73.1% 57.1% 57.1% 30.4% 25.8% 25.8%

FA 103 fr, min (risky) 0.69 0.33 0.33 1.0 0.38 0.38 9.9 2.0 2.0

Avg. Proc. (Frame) 162 ms 101 ms 638 ms

the processing time constraint lowers the precisionof the stereo system by about 6–8%, but leads toa significant speed-up of almost 40%. This speed-up is mainly achieved by choosing very strict pa-rameters for the first two modules, stereo-based ROIgeneration and shape-based detection, so that fewerROIs have to be processed by the system compared tothe unconstrained variant. The same overall sensitiv-ity is then attained by relaxing the parameters of thesubsequent modules texture classification and stereoverification. The mono system suffers from a high num-ber of false detections made on cluttered background,which are otherwise cut out by the stereo-based ROIgeneration.

A separate evaluation was made for pedestrians di-rectly in front of the car, i.e. which are in particu-lar risk, by restricting the sensor coverage area to amaximum lateral offset from the vehicle medial axisof 1.5 m (instead of 4 m). Performance significantlyincreases when only those “risky” pedestrians areconsidered.

Finally, Fig. 14 provides three screen shots of thePROTECTOR system in action. The top image illus-trates a test track scenario, the lower images two ur-ban scenes. The left sub-images show the results ofstereo-based ROI generation (the bounding boxes ofshape templates activated by stereo are shown in grey,as discussed in Section 3.2.1). Middle sub-images con-tain detection results superimposed. The right sub-images contain a top view of the scene in front of thevehicle. Shown is the sensor coverage area, with dis-tance scale in meters. Detected pedestrians are denotedby white dots, (relative) velocity vectors by white linesegments. The bottom image shows a typical false de-tection on traffic infrastructure.

6. Discussion

One is naturally inclined to put the obtained systemperformance in perspective by comparing it to that ofprevious systems and, secondly, to one that might beexpected of a future commercially-viable system. Yetboth type of comparisons are difficult, for different rea-sons. A thorough comparison with previous systemsis only possible if all test criteria have been laid outand applied uniformly, on the identical test data set.We have already argued that test criteria were insuf-ficiently spelled out in previous work, and addressedthis here by Section 5.1. Furthermore, the use of merelyhundreds of images for the test set (see last column ofTable 1) can lead to very significant performance vari-ations depending on the “ease” of the selected data set.Performance swings related to the number of false pos-itives up to orders of magnitude are not uncommon. Inour test set, using many thousands of images, we haveobserved much smaller performance variations, in theorder of a couple of percentages.

But size is not all that matters. Special caution shouldbe taken when, for example, comparing performancereached on data from a surveillance scenario (e.g. Violaet al., 2005) with that of a moving vehicle (this pa-per). In the former case, the downward tilted cameratypically sees the uniform “greyish” background ofthe road as the backdrop of pedestrians, backgrounddiversity is limited by the stationary nature of the cam-era. This helps improve pedestrian/non-pedestrian dis-crimination, compared to the case where the camera isvehicle-mounted and non-tilted, where pedestrian areseen against the backdrop of an ever changing com-plex environment (e.g. vehicles, traffic infrastructure).With all the necessary caveats in place, can now turn to

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Figure 14. PROTECTOR system results: stereo preprocessing, detections and trajectories.

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58 Gavrila and Munder

Table 1 and observe that, in terms of the performancemetric typically listed (i.e. correct/false detections perframe), the proposed PROTECTOR stereo-system isvery competitive, certainly when considering process-ing speed constraints. The advantage of using stereofurthermore becomes clear when comparing it to amono version, it produces an order of magnitude morefalse positives (see Fig. 13).

A number of methodical improvements could helpovercome the above performance gap. Related to theearly attention focusing stages, we are interested indetecting independently moving objects using the so-called flow-depth constraint (Heinrich, 2002) and in themore general problem of ego-motion estimation fromtime-varying stereo data. Computational resources per-mitting, processing could start with the computation ofdense stereo over the entire image, for more accurateobject segmentation. We are also interested in more so-phisticated tracking by means of a spatio-temporal ob-ject representations using distinct linear subspace mod-els or Dynamic Point Distribution Models (DPDMs)(Giebel et al., 2004). State propagation is achieved bya particle filter which combines the three cues shape,texture and depth in its observation density function.Detections are integrated into tracking by means ofimportance sampling.

7. Conclusions

This paper introduced a multi-cue vision system forreal-time pedestrian detection and tracking from amoving vehicle, called PROTECTOR. The detectioncomponent involved a cascade of modules, eachutilizing complementary visual criteria to focus onrelevant image regions. Tight integration ensured thatvaluable information (constraints) is passed on be-tween successive modules. A novel mixture-of-expertsarchitecture, involving texture-based component clas-sifiers weighted by the outcome of shape matching,was shown to outperform the single texture classifierapproach.

In order to cope with the complexity of such largevision system, the paper analyzed the performance ofindividual modules and their interaction by means ofROCs. A sequential optimization heuristic was shownto result in near-optimal system parameter settings,while incorporating processing time constraints.

Extensive experiments in difficult urban traffic con-ditions showed that PROTECTOR reaches a correctrecognition percentage of 62–100% at the cost of 0.3–

5 false classifications per minute. The stereo version ofthe system clearly outperformed a mono version; per-formance was furthermore enhanced by a restrictionof the sensor coverage area and more processing time.Although overall results are promising, much more re-search is needed before PROTECTOR-like systems canreach ROC performance adequate for real-world use.

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