Illumination Distribution-Aware Thermal Pedestrian Detection

Pedestrian detection is an important task in computer vision, which is also an important part of intelligent transportation systems. For privacy protection, thermal images are widely used in pedestrian detection problems. However, thermal pedestrian detection is challenging due to the significant effect of temperature variation on the illumination of images and that fine-grained illumination annotations are difficult to be acquired. The existing methods have attempted to exploit coarse-grained day/night labels, which however even hampers the model performance. In this work, we introduce a novel idea of regressing conditional thermal-visible feature distribution, dubbed as Illumination Distribution-Aware adaptation (IDA). The key idea is to predict the conditional visible feature distribution given a thermal image, subject to their pre-computed joint distribution. Specifically, we first estimate the thermal-visible feature joint distribution by constructing feature co-occurrence matrices, offering a conditional probability distribution for any given thermal image. With this pairing information, we then form a conditional probability distribution regression task for model optimization. Critically, as a model agnostic strategy, this allows the visible feature knowledge to be transferred to the thermal counterpart implicitly for learning more discriminating feature representation. Experiment results show that our method outperforms the prior art methods, which use extra illumination annotations. Besides, as a plug-in, our method can averagely reduce about 2% MR on KAIST dataset, and improve about 1% mAP on FLIR-aligned and Autonomous Vehicles datasets without extra calculation for test. Code is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/HaMeow-lst1/IDA</uri>.