Can We Detect Pedestrians using Low-resolution LIDAR? - Integration of Multi-frame Point-clouds

In recent years, demand for pedestrian detection using inexpensive low-resolution LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) is increasing, as it can be used to prevent traffic accidents involving pedestrians. However, it is difficult to detect pedestrians from a low-resolution (sparse) point-cloud obtained by a low-resolution LIDAR. In this paper, we propose multi-frame features calculated by integrating point-clouds over multiple frames for increasing the point-cloud resolution, and extracting their temporal changes. By combining these features, the accuracy of the pedestrian detection from low-resolution point-clouds can be improved. We conducted experiments using LIDAR data obtained in actual traffic environments. Experimental results showed that the proposed method could detect pedestrians accurately from low-resolution LIDAR data.