Body Parts Features-Based Pedestrian Detection for Active Pedestrian Protection System

A novel pedestrian detection system based on vision in urban traffic situations is presented to help the driver perceive the pedestrian ahead of the vehicle. To enhance the accuracy and to decrease the time spent on pedestrian detection in such complicated situations, the pedestrian is detected by dividing their body into several parts according to their corresponding features in the image. The candidate pedestrian leg is segmented based on the gentle AdaBoost algorithm by training the optimized histogram of gradient features. The candidate pedestrian head is located by matching the pedestrian head and shoulder model above the region of the candidate leg. Then the candidate leg, head and shoulder are combined by parts constraint and threshold adjustment to verify the existence of the pedestrian. Finally, the experiments in real urban traffic circumstances were conducted. The results show that the proposed pedestrian detection method can achieve pedestrian detection rate of 92.1% with the average detection time of 0.2257 s