Pedestrian detection is a challenging task, mainly owing to the numerous appearances of human bodies. Modern detectors extract representative features via the deep neural network; however, they usually require a large training set and high-performance GPUs. For these cases, we propose a novel human detection approach that integrates a pretrained face detector based on multitask cascaded convolutional neural networks and a traditional pedestrian detector based on aggregate channel features via a score combination module. The proposed detector is a promising approach that can be used to handle pedestrian detection with limited datasets and computational resources. The proposed detector is investigated comprehensively in terms of parameter choices to optimize its performance. The robustness of the proposed detector in terms of the training set, test set, and threshold is observed via tests and cross dataset validations on various pedestrian datasets, including the INRIA, part of the ETHZ, and the Caltech and Citypersons datasets. Experiments have proved that this integrated detector yields a significant increase in recall and a decrease in the log average miss rate compared with sole use of the traditional pedestrian detector. At the same time, the proposed method achieves a comparable performance to FRCNN on the INRIA test set compared with sole use of the Aggregated Channel Features detector.
Keywords: aggregate channel features; combination of detectors; multitask cascaded convolutional networks; pedestrian detection.