Group Cost-Sensitive Boosting for Multi-Resolution Pedestrian Detection

Abstract

As an important yet challenging problem in computer vision, pedestrian detection has achieved impressive progress in recent years. However, the significant performance decline with decreasing resolution is a major bottleneck of current state-of-the-art methods. For the popular boosting-based detectors, one of the main reasons is that low resolution samples, which are usually more difficult to detect than high resolution ones, are treated by equal costs in the boosting process, leading to the consequence that they are more easily being rejected in early stages and can hardly be recovered in late stages as false negatives. To address this problem, we propose in this paper a new multi-resolution detection approach based on a novel group cost-sensitive boosting algorithm, which extends the popular AdaBoost by exploring different costs for different resolution groups in the boosting process, and places more emphases on low resolution group in order to better handle detection of hard samples. The proposed approach is evaluated on the challenging Caltech pedestrian benchmark, and outperforms other state-of-the-art on different resolution-specific test sets.