Pedestrian Detection for Driver Assistance Using Multiresolution Infrared Vision

Abstract—This paper describes a system for pedestrian detection in infrared images, which has been implemented on an experimental vehicle equipped with an infrared camera. The proposed system has been tested in many situations and has proven to be efficient and with a very low false-positive rate. It is based on a multiresolution localization of warm symmetrical objects with specific size and aspect ratio; anyway, because road infrastructures and other road participants may also have such characteristics, a set of matched filters is included in order to reduce false detections. A final validation process, based on human shape’s morphological characteristics, is used to build the list of pedestrian appearing in the scene. Neither temporal correlation nor motion cues are used in this first part of the project: the processing is based on the analysis of single frames only.