Fast and Efficient Pedestrian Detection via the Cascade Implementation of an Additive Kernel Support Vector Machine

For reliable driving assistance or automated driving, pedestrian detection must be robust and performed in real time. In pedestrian detection, a linear support vector machine (linSVM) is popularly used as a classifier but exhibits degraded performance due to the multipostures of pedestrians. Kernel SVM (KSVM) could be a better choice for pedestrian detection, but it has a disadvantage in that it requires too much more computation than linSVM. In this paper, the cascade implementation of the additive KSVM (AKSVM) is proposed for the application of pedestrian detection. AKSVM avoids kernel expansion by using lookup tables, and it is implemented in cascade form, thereby speeding up pedestrian detection. The cascade implementation is trained by a genetic algorithm such that the computation time is minimized, whereas the detection accuracy is maximized. In experiments, the proposed method is tested with the INRIA dataset. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method has better detection accuracy and reduced computation time compared with conventional methods.