LAUSR

Abstract A critical bottleneck in pedestrian detection is the detection of small-scale pedestrians, which have low contrast and blurry shapes in images and videos. Considered that the body shape of a pedestrian is always rectangular (the height is greater than the width), we propose an asymmetric multi-stage network (AMS-Net) for small-scale pedestrian detection. The proposed method has two main advantages. (1) It considers the asymmetry of a pedestrian’s body shape in pedestrian detection. The rectangular anchors are used to generate various rectangular proposals that have a height greater than the width. In addition, asymmetric rectangular convolution kernels are adopted for capturing the compact features of the pedestrian body. (2) The proposed AMS-Net gradually rejects the non-pedestrian boxes according to coarse-to-fine features in a three-stage framework. The proposed AMS-Net significantly improves the performance of pedestrian detection on the Far subset of the Caltech testing set (the miss rate decreases from 60.79% to 51.36%). It also achieves competitive performance on the INRIA, ETH, KITTI and CityPersons benchmarks.