Camera and Laser Scanner Co-detection of Pedestrians

Intelligent vehicle technology is a promising technology for enhancing urban traffic safety and efficiency. Pedestrian detection is an important issue for applications of intelligent vehicles in urban environments. The kind of most widely used method for pedestrian detection is vision based method. One general problem for vision based method is how to efficiently locate a proper ROI (region of interests) which contains a candidate object. Another problem is how to detect and segment features of candidate objects out of ROI. In this paper, a camera and laser scanner co-detection method is proposed. First, a method of camera and laser scanner co-calibration is presented. Second, a method of how to obtain proper ROI and the contours of candidate objects using the co-calibration results is introduced. Finally, a decision rule is induced from a set of examples of contour shapes of both pedestrians and landmarks (They are most likely to be confused with each other because of their similarity in size). Some experimental results are given for validating the camera and laser scanner co-detection method.