Detection of moving targets from a moving ground platform
Thomas B. Sebastian, Christopher M. Wynnyk, Peter Tu, Sabrina B. Barnes · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2009
Semi-autonomous operation of intelligent vehicles may require that such platforms maintain a basic situational awareness with respect to people, other vehicles and their intent. These vehicles should be able to operate safely among people and other vehicles, and be able to perceive threats and respond accordingly. A key requirement is the ability to detect people and vehicles from a moving platform. We have developed one such algorithm using video cameras mounted on the vehicle. Our person detection algorithms model the shape and appearance of the person instead of modeling the background. This algorithm uses histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), which model shape and appearance using image edge histograms. These HOG descriptors are computed on an exhaustive set of image windows, which are then classified as person/non-person using a support vector machine classifier. The image windows are computed using camera calibration, which provides approximate size of people with respect to their location in the imagery. The algorithm is flexible and has been trained for different domains such as urban, rural and wooded scenes. We have designed a sensor platform that can be mounted on a moving vehicle to collect video data of pedestrians. Using manually annotated ground-truth data we have evaluated the person detection algorithm in terms of true positive and false positive rates. This paper provides a detailed overview of the algorithm, describes the experiments conducted and reports on algorithmic performance.