A computationally effective pedestrian detection using constrained fusion with body parts for autonomous driving

This paper addresses the problem of detecting pedestrians using an enhanced object detection method. In particular, the paper considers the occluded pedestrian detection problem in autonomous driving scenarios where the balance of performance between accuracy and speed is crucial. Existing works focus on learning representations of unique persons independent of body parts semantics. To achieve a real-time performance along with robust detection, we introduce a body parts based pedestrian detection architecture where body parts are fused through a computationally effective constraint optimization technique. We demonstrate that our method significantly improves detection accuracy while adding negligible runtime overhead. We evaluate our method using a real-world dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing pedestrian detection methods.