Shearlet Features for Pedestrian Detection

A long-time, hand-crafted features governed by a directional image analysis have been the base for the best performing pedestrian detection algorithms. In the past few years, approaches using convolutional neural networks have taken over the leadership concerning detection quality. We investigate in which way shearlets can be used for an improved hand-crafted feature computation in order to reduce the gap to CNNs. Shearlets are a relatively new mathematical framework for multiscale signal analysis, which can be seen as an extension of the wavelet framework. Shearlets are designed to capture directional information and can therefore be used for detecting the orientation of edges in images. We use this characteristic to compute image features with high informative content for pedestrian detection. Furthermore, we provide experimental results using these features and show that they outperform the results obtained by the currently best performing hand-crafted features for pedestrian detection.