Study and Analysis of Convolutional Neural Networks for Pedestrian Detection in Autonomous Vehicles

The automotive industry is heading towards more automation. This puts high demands on many systems like Pedestrian Detection Systems. Such systems need to operate in real time with high accuracy and in embedded systems with limited power, memory resources and compute power. This in turn puts high demands on model size and model design. Lately Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have dominated the field of object detection and therefore it is reasonable to believe that they are suited for pedestrian detection as well. Therefore, this thesis investigates how ConvNets have been used for pedestrian detection and how such solutions can be implemented in embedded systems on FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). The conclusions drawn are that ConvNets indeed perform well on pedestrian detection in terms of accuracy but to a cost of large model sizes and heavy computations. This thesis also comes up with a design proposal of a ConvNet for pedestrian detection with the implementation in an embedded system in mind. The proposed network performs well on pedestrian classification and the performance looks promising for detection as well, but further development is required