Copyright © 2013 Song-Zhi Su and Shu-Yuan Chen. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This work presents the fusion of integral channel features to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of pedestrian detection. The proposed method combines the histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and local binary pattern (LBP) features by a concatenated fusion method. Although neural network (NN) is an efficient tool for classification, the time complexity is heavy. Hence, we choose support vector machine (SVM) with the histogram intersection kernel (HIK) as a classifier. On the other hand, although many datasets have been collected for pedestrian detection, few are designed to detect pedestrians in low-resolution visual images and at night time. This work collects two new pedestrian datasets—one for low-resolution visual images and one for near-infrared images—to evaluate detection performance on various image types and at different times. The proposed fusion method uses only images from the INRIA dataset for training but works on the two newly collected datasets, thereby avoiding the training overhead for cross-datasets. The experimental results verify that the proposed method has high detection accuracies even in the variations of image types and time slots.