Detecting Multi-Resolution Pedestrians Using Group Cost-Sensitive Boosting with Channel Features

Abstract

Significant progress has been achieved in the past few years for the challenging task of pedestrian detection. Nevertheless, a major bottleneck of existing state-of-the-art approaches lies in a great drop in performance with reducing resolutions of the detected targets. For the boosting-based detectors which are popular in pedestrian detection literature, a possible cause for this drop is that in their boosting training process, low-resolution samples, which are usually more difficult to be detected due to the missing details, are still treated equally importantly as high-resolution samples, resulting in the false negatives since they are more easily rejected in the early stages and can hardly be recovered in the late stages. To address this problem, we propose in this paper a robust multi-resolution detection approach with a novel group cost-sensitive boosting algorithm, which is derived from the standard AdaBoost algorithm to further explore different costs for different resolution groups of the samples in the boosting process, and to place greater emphasis on low-resolution groups in order to better handle the detection of multi-resolution targets. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated on the Caltech pedestrian benchmark and KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) multispectral pedestrian benchmark, and validated by its promising performance on different resolution-specific test sets of both benchmarks.