44 Gavrila and Munder
Table 1. Overview of current pedestrian detection systems. Detection performance derived by visual inspection of ROC graphs in respective
publications (approximation). “f.pos.” denotes false positives.
Sensor Coverage Detection Performance Tracking Processing
Authors type area (per frame) (per trajectory) speed Test set
Papageorgiou mono, – 70% correct, 0.15 f.pos. no 20 min 123 ped. images,
and Poggio visible (full set color wavelets) (200 MHz PC) 50 non-ped.
(2000) 70% correct, 3 f.pos. 10 Hz images
(red. grey wavelet set)
Mohan et al. mono, – 85% correct, 0.03 f.pos no – 123 ped. images
(2001) visible 50 non-ped
images
Viola et al. mono, – 80% correct, 0.5 f.pos no 4 Hz 2 sequences
(2005) visible (2.8 GHz PC) of 2000 images
(stat. camera)
Elzein et al. mono, – 69% correct, no 95s 16 ped. images +
(2003) visible 61% precision (500 MHz PC) few sequences
Shashua mono, 3–25 m 96% correct, 5.6 ×10
−6
f.pos yes 10 Hz 1–5 hrs
et al. visible (inward moving) urban drive
(2004) 93% correct, 8.3 ×10
−5
f.pos
(stationary in-path)
85% correct, 2.9 ×10
−3
f.pos
(stationary out-path)
Zhao and stereo, – 85% correct, 3% f.pos no 3–12 Hz –
Thorpe visible (per stereo ROI) (450 MHz PC)
(2000)
Bertozzi et al. stereo, – 83% correct, 0.46 f.pos no – 1500 images,
(2004) visible 1897 ped. instances
Grubb et al. stereo, – 84% correct, 0.004 f.pos yes 23 Hz 2500 images,
(2004) visible (2.4 GHz PC) 14 different peds.
Gavrila and stereo, 10–25m 61–81% correct, 78–100% cor., 3–7 Hz sequence of
Munder visible in front [0.7–23] ×10
−3
f.pos 0.3–3.5 f.pos/min 17390 images,
(current up to 4m (speed unoptimized) 694 ped. instances
paper) lateral 59–75% correct, 78–100% cor., 7–15 Hz 17067 non-ped.
[1.0–27] ×10
−3
f.pos 0.4–5.1 f.pos/min (2.4 GHz PC) images
(speed optimized)
Fang et al. mono, – 84% correct, 19% f.pos no – 289 ped. images
(2003) FIR (summer)
92% correct, 3% f.pos
(winter)
at hand. Within this work, we aim to exploit the cascade
coupling of system modules.
Cascaded classifiers(Viola et al.,2005)haverecently
received increasing interest due to their computational
efficiency, and a number of publications addressed their
optimization. For example, Sun et al. (2004) and Luo
(2005) observed that the overall cascade performance
is optimal if the slope of the log-scale ROC curve is
equal for all nodes, given that the individual cascade
nodes are statistically independent. No such assump-
tion is made by Huo and Chen (2004), who recently
proposed a ROC “frontier-following” heuristic to suc-
cessively adjust the thresholds of a classifier cascade.
The idea of analyzing the optimal front of ROC points
was first utilized by Provost and Fawcett (2001) in the
context of classifier comparison. They showed that, for
any misclassification costs, the optimal classifiers are
located on the ROC convex hull. Here, we extend both
ideas (Huo and Chen, 2004; Provost and Fawcett, 2001)
by developing a technique to sequentially optimize a
cascade of complex system modules, each controlled
by a number of parameters, and by incorporating user-
defined constraints.
This paper builds on earlier work described in
Gavrila et al. (2004). We consider the main contri-
butions of this paper the integration of modules in a