Discriminative Part CNN for Pedestrian Detection

Abstract

Pedestrian detection is a significant task in computer vision. In recent years, it is widely used in applications such as intelligent surveillance systems and automated driving systems. Although it has been exhaustively studied in the last decade, the occlusion handling issue still remains unsolved. One convincing idea is to first detect human body parts, and then utilize the parts information to estimate the pedestrians' existence. Many parts-based pedestrian detection approaches have been proposed based on this idea. However, in most of these approaches, the low-quality parts mining and the clumsy part detector combination is a bottleneck that limits the detection performance. To eliminate the bottleneck, we propose Discriminative Part CNN (DP-CNN). Our approach has two main contributions: (1) We propose a high-quality body parts mining method based on both convolutional layer features and body part subclasses. The mined part clusters are not only discriminative but also representative, and can help to construct powerful pedestrian detectors. (2) We propose a novel method to combine multiple part detectors. We convert the part detectors to a middle layer of a CNN and optimize the whole detection pipeline by fine-tuning that CNN. In experiments, it shows astonishing effectiveness of optimization and robustness of occlusion handling.