Performance Improvement of Pedestrian Detection using a GM-PHD Filter

Abstract

Pedestrian detection has largely been researched as one of the important technologies for autonomous driving vehicle and preventing accidents. There are two categories for pedestrian detection, camera-based and LIDAR-based. LIDAR-based methods have the advantage of the wide angle of view and insensitivity of illuminance change while camera-based methods have not. However, there are several problems with 3D LIDAR, such as insufficient resolution to detect distant pedestrians and decrease in detection rate in a complex situation due to segmentation error and occlusion. In this paper, two methods using GM-PHD filter are proposed to improve the poor rates of pedestrian detection algorithms based on 3D LIDAR. First one improves detection performance and resolution of object by automatic accumulation of points in previous frames onto current objects. Second one additionally enhances the detection results by applying the GM-PHD filter which is modified in order to handle the poor situation to classified multi target. A quantitative evaluation with autonomously acquired road environment data shows the proposed methods highly increase the performance of existing pedestrian detection algorithms.