Self-adaptive scale pedestrian detection algorithm based on deep residual network

Purpose The conventional pedestrian detection algorithms lack in scale sensitivity. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel algorithm of self-adaptive scale pedestrian detection, based on deep residual network (DRN), to address such lacks. Design/methodology/approach First, the "Edge boxes" algorithm is introduced to extract region of interests from pedestrian images. Then, the extracted bounding boxes are incorporated to different DRNs, one is a large-scale DRN and the other one is the small-scale DRN. The height of the bounding boxes is used to classify the results of pedestrians and to regress the bounding boxes to the entity of the pedestrian. At last, a weighted self-adaptive scale function, which combines the large-scale results and small-scale results, is designed for the final pedestrian detection. Findings To validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed algorithm, some comparison experiments have been done on the common pedestrian detection data sets: Caltech, INRIA, ETH and KITTI. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is adapted for the various scales of the pedestrians. For the hard detected small-scale pedestrians, the proposed algorithm has improved the accuracy and robustness of detections. Originality/value By applying different models to deal with different scales of pedestrians, the proposed algorithm with the weighted calculation function has improved the accuracy and robustness for different scales of pedestrians.