An Efficient Vision-Based Pedestrian Detection and Tracking System for ITS Applications

In this thesis, a novel Pedestrian Protection System (PPS), composed of the Pedestrian Detection System (PDS) and the Pedestrian Tracking System (PTS), was proposed. The PPS is a supplementary application for the Advanced Driver Assistance System, which is used to avoid collisions between vehicles and pedestrians. The Pedestrian Detection System (PDS) is used to detect pedestrians from near to far ranges with the feature-classifier-based detection method (HOG + SVM). To achieve pedestrian detection from near to far ranges, a novel structure was proposed. The structure of our PDS consists of two cameras (called CS and CL separately). The CS is equipped with a short focal length lens to detect pedestrians in near-to-mid range; and, the CL is equipped with a long focal length lens to detect pedestrians in mid-to-far range. To accelerate the processing speed of pedestrian detection, the parallel computing capacity of GPU was utilized in the PDS. The synchronization algorithm is also introduced to synchronize the detection results of CS and CL. Based on the novel pedestrian detection structure, the detection process can reach a distance which is more than 130 meters away without decreasing detection accuracy. The detection range can be extended more than 100 meters without decreasing the processing speed of pedestrian detection. Afterwards, an algorithm to eliminate duplicate detection results is proposed to improve the detection accuracy. The Pedestrian Tracking System (PTS) is applied following the Pedestrian Detection System. The PTS is used to track the movement trajectory of pedestrians and to predict the future motion and movement direction. A C + + class (called PedestrianTracking class, which is short for PTC) was generated to operate the tracking process for every detected pedestrian. The Kalman filter is the main algorithm inside the PTC. During the operation of PPS, the final detection results of each frame from PDS will be transmitted to the PTS to enable the tracking process. The new detection results will be used to update the existing tracking results in the PTS. Moreover, if there is a newly detected pedestrian, a new process will be generated to track the pedestrian in the PTS. Based on the tracking results in PTS, the movement trajectory of pedestrians can be obtained and their future motion and movement direction can be predicted. Two kinds of alerts are generated based on the predictions: warning alert and dangerous alert. These two alerts represent different situations; and, they will alert drivers to the upcoming situations. Based on the predictions and alerts, the collisions can be prevented effectively. The safety of pedestrians can be guaranteed.