Boosted Convolutional Neural Networks (BCNN) for Pedestrian Detection

A boosted convolutional neural network (BCNN) system is proposed to enhance the pedestrian detection performance in this work. Being inspired by the classic boosting idea, we develop a weighted loss function that emphasizes challenging samples in training a convolutional neural network (CNN). Two types of samples are considered challenging: 1) samples with detection scores falling in the decision boundary, and 2) temporally associated samples with inconsistent scores. A weighting scheme is designed for each of them. Finally, we train a boosted fusion layer to benefit from the integration of these two weighting schemes. We use the Fast-RCNN as the baseline, and test the corresponding BCNN on the Caltech pedestrian dataset in the experiment, and show a significant performance gain of the BCNN over its baseline.