Human detection using partial least squares analysis

Significant research has been devoted to detecting people in images and videos. In this paper we describe a human detection method that augments widely used edge-based features with texture and color information, providing us with a much richer descriptor set. This augmentation results in an extremely high-dimensional feature space (more than 170,000 dimensions). In such high-dimensional spaces, classical machine learning algorithms such as SVMs are nearly intractable with respect to training. Furthermore, the number of training samples is much smaller than the dimensionality of the feature space, by at least an order of magnitude. Finally, the extraction of features from a densely sampled grid structure leads to a high degree of multicollinearity. To circumvent these data characteristics, we employ Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis, an efficient dimensionality reduction technique, one which preserves significant discriminative information, to project the data onto a much lower dimensional subspace (20 dimensions, reduced from the original 170,000). Our human detection system, employing PLS analysis over the enriched descriptor set, is shown to outperform state-of-the-art techniques on three varied datasets including the popular INRIA pedestrian dataset, the low-resolution gray-scale DaimlerChrysler pedestrian dataset, and the ETHZ pedestrian dataset consisting of full-length videos of crowded scenes.