MARF: Multiscale Adaptive-switch Random Forest for Leg Detection with 2D Laser Scanners

TL;DR

This paper introduces MARF, a multiscale adaptive-switch random forest that improves leg detection accuracy and robustness in 2D laser scans, enhancing people detection and tracking performance.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel multiscale adaptive-switch random forest that handles noise and multiscale features for more reliable leg detection in laser scans.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art leg detectors on Moving Legs dataset.

Achieves over 60 FPS on low-cost laptops.

Enhances people detection and tracking accuracy.

Abstract

For the 2D laser-based tasks, e.g., people detection and people tracking, leg detection is usually the first step. Thus, it carries great weight in determining the performance of people detection and people tracking. However, many leg detectors ignore the inevitable noise and the multiscale characteristics of the laser scan, which makes them sensitive to the unreliable features of point cloud and further degrades the performance of the leg detector. In this paper, we propose a multiscale adaptive-switch Random Forest (MARF) to overcome these two challenges. Firstly, the adaptive-switch decision tree is designed to use noisesensitive features to conduct weighted classification and noiseinvariant features to conduct binary classification, which makes our detector perform more robust to noise. Secondly, considering the multiscale property that the sparsity of the 2D point cloud is proportional to the length of laser beams, we design a multiscale random forest structure to detect legs at different distances. Moreover, the proposed approach allows us to discover a sparser human leg from point clouds than others. Consequently, our method shows an improved performance compared to other state-of-the-art leg detectors on the challenging Moving Legs dataset and retains the whole pipeline at a speed of 60+ FPS on lowcomputational laptops. Moreover, we further apply the proposed MARF to the people detection and tracking system, achieving a considerable gain in all metrics.