Discriminative Deformable Part Model for Pedestrian Detection with Occlusion Handling

Efficient pedestrian detection plays an important role in many practical daily life applications, such as autonomous cars, video surveillance, and intelligent driving assistance systems. The main goal of pedestrian detection systems, especially in vehicles, is to prevent accidents. By recognizing pedestrians in real time, these systems can alert drivers or even autonomously apply brakes, minimizing the possibility of collisions. However, occlusion is a major obstacle to pedestrian detection. Pedestrians are typically occluded by trees, street poles, cars, and other pedestrians. State-of-the-art detection methods are based on fully visible or little-occluded pedestrians; hence, their performance declines with increasing occlusion level. To meet this challenge, a pedestrian detector capable of handling occlusion is preferred. To increase the detection accuracy for occluded pedestrians, we propose a new method called the Discriminative Deformable Part Model (DDPM), which uses the concept of breaking human image into deformable parts via machine learning. In existing works, human image breaking into deformable parts has been performed by human intuition. In our novel approach, machine learning is used for deformable objects such as humans, combining the benefits and removing the drawbacks of the previous works. We also propose a new pedestrian dataset based on Eastern clothes to accommodate the detector’s evaluation under different intra-class variations of pedestrians. The proposed method achieves a higher detection accuracy on Pascal VOC and VisDrone Detection datasets when compared with other popular detection methods.