A One-and-Half Stage Pedestrian Detector

International audiencePedestrian detection is a specific instance of the more general problem of object detection in computer vision. A balance between detection accuracy and speed is a desirable trait for pedestrian detection systems in many applications such as self-driving cars. In this paper, we follow the wisdom of " and less is often more" to achieve this balance. We propose a lightweight mechanism based on semantic segmentation to reduce the number of anchors to be processed. We furthermore unify this selection with the intra-anchor feature pooling strategy adopted in high performance two-stage detectors such as Faster-RCNN. Such a strategy is avoided in one-stage detectors like SSD in favour of faster inference but at the cost of reducing the accuracy vis-à-vis two-stage detectors. However our anchor selection renders it practical to use feature pooling without giving up the inference speed. Our proposed approach succeeds in detecting pedestrians with state-of-art performance on caltech-reasonable and ciypersons datasets with inference speeds of ∼ 32 fps