Accurate Pedestrian Detection by Human Pose Regression

Pedestrian detection with high detection and localization accuracy is increasingly important for many practical applications. Due to the flexible structure of the human body, it is hard to train a template-based pedestrian detector that achieves a high detection rate and a good localization accuracy simultaneously. In this paper, we utilize human pose estimation to improve the detection and localization accuracy of pedestrian detection. We design two kinds of pose-indexed features that can considerably improve the discriminability of the detector. In addition to employing a two-stage pipeline to carry out these two tasks, we unify pose estimation and pedestrian detection into a cascaded decision forest in which they can cooperate sufficiently. To prevent irregular positive examples, such as truncated ones, from distracting the pedestrian detection and the pose regression, we clean the positive training data by realigning the bounding boxes and rejecting the wrong positive samples. Experimental results on the Caltech test dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our detector achieves 11.1% MR-2, outperforming all existing detectors without using the convolutional neural network (CNN). Moreover, our method can be assembled with other detectors based on CNNs to improve detection and localization performance. By collaborating with the recent CNN-based method, our detector achieves 5.5% MR-2 on the Caltech test dataset, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods.