An experimental study on pedestrian classification

Detecting people in images is key for several important application domains in computer vision. This paper presents an in-depth experimental study on pedestrian classification; multiple feature-classifier combinations are examined with respect to their ROC performance and efficiency. We investigate global versus local and adaptive versus nonadaptive features, as exemplified by PCA coefficients, Haar wavelets, and local receptive fields (LRFs). In terms of classifiers, we consider the popular Support Vector Machines (SVMs), feed-forward neural networks, and k-nearest neighbor classifier. Experiments are performed on a large data set consisting of 4,000 pedestrian and more than 25,000 nonpedestrian (labeled) images captured in outdoor urban environments. Statistically meaningful results are obtained by analyzing performance variances caused by varying training and test sets. Furthermore, we investigate how classification performance and training sample size are correlated. Sample size is adjusted by increasing the number of manually labeled training data or by employing automatic bootstrapping or cascade techniques. Our experiments show that the novel combination of SVMs with LRF features performs best. A boosted cascade of Haar wavelets can, however, reach quite competitive results, at a fraction of computational cost. The data set used in this paper is made public, establishing a benchmark for this important problem.