Department of Electrical Engineering (ISY)

Near Zone Pedestrian Detection using a Low-Resolution FIR Sensor

J.-E. Källhammer, D. Eriksson, G. Granlund, M. Felsberg, A. Moe, B. Johansson, J. Wiklund, P.-E. Forssén
IV07, Istanbul, Turkey
Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV'07)
June 2007

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility to use a single low-resolution FIR camera for detection of pedestrians in the near zone in front of a vehicle. A low resolution sensor reduces the cost of the system, as well as the amount of data that needs to be processed in each frame. We present a system that makes use of hot-spots and image positions of a near constant bearing to detect potential pedestrians. These detections provide seeds for an energy minimization algorithm that fits a pedestrian model to the detection. Since false alarms are hard to tolerate, the pedestrian model is then tracked, and the distance-to-collision (DTC) is measured by integrating size change measurements at sub-pixel accuracy, and the car velocity. The system should only engage braking for detections on a collision course, with a reliably measured DTC. Preliminary experiments on a number of recorded near collision sequences indicate that our method may be useful for ranges up to about 10m using an 80x60 sensor, and somewhat more using a 160x120 sensor. We also analyze the robustness of the evaluated algorithm with respect to dead pixels, a potential problem for low-resolution sensors.

Full Paper

On-line proceedings available from IEEE Xplore.

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Bibtex entry

@InProceedings{kegfmjwf07,
  author = 	 {J.-E. K\"allhammer and D. Eriksson and G. Granlund and M. Felsberg and A. Moe and B. Johansson and J. Wiklund and P.-E. Forss\'en},
  title = 	 {Near Zone Pedestrian Detection using a Low-Resolution FIR Sensor},
  booktitle = {Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV'07)},
  OPTpages = 	 {},
  year = 	 {2007},
  OPTeditor = 	 {},
  OPTvolume = 	 {},
  OPTnumber = 	 {},
  OPTseries = 	 {},
  address = 	 {Istanbul, Turkey},
  month = 	 {June},
  isbn =         {1-4244-1067-3},
  issn =         {1931-0587},
  organization = {{IEEE} Intelligent Transportation Systems Society},
  publisher = {{IEEE}}
}