Spatiotemporal Stacked Sequential Learning for Pedestrian Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a spatiotemporal stacked sequential learning approach that leverages correlations across space and time to significantly improve pedestrian detection accuracy with minimal additional computational cost.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel SSL-based method that incorporates neighboring frame responses to enhance pedestrian classifier performance, especially in critical scenarios.

Findings

Significant boost in detection accuracy across datasets.

Improved detection in challenging, close-distance scenarios.

Minimal impact on computational efficiency.

Abstract

Pedestrian classifiers decide which image windows contain a pedestrian. In practice, such classifiers provide a relatively high response at neighbor windows overlapping a pedestrian, while the responses around potential false positives are expected to be lower. An analogous reasoning applies for image sequences. If there is a pedestrian located within a frame, the same pedestrian is expected to appear close to the same location in neighbor frames. Therefore, such a location has chances of receiving high classification scores during several frames, while false positives are expected to be more spurious. In this paper we propose to exploit such correlations for improving the accuracy of base pedestrian classifiers. In particular, we propose to use two-stage classifiers which not only rely on the image descriptors required by the base classifiers but also on the response of such base classifiers in a given spatiotemporal neighborhood. More specifically, we train pedestrian classifiers using a stacked sequential learning (SSL) paradigm. We use a new pedestrian dataset we have acquired from a car to evaluate our proposal at different frame rates. We also test on a well known dataset: Caltech. The obtained results show that our SSL proposal boosts detection accuracy significantly with a minimal impact on the computational cost. Interestingly, SSL improves more the accuracy at the most dangerous situations, i.e. when a pedestrian is close to the camera.