Nighttime Pedestrian and Vehicle Detection Based on a Fast Saliency and Multifeature Fusion Algorithm for Infrared Images

In recent years, pedestrian and vehicle detection at night has become an important subject of computer vision applications. Because the environment light is weak at night, the common traditional camera-input algorithms often performs poorly. Pedestrians and vehicles in infrared images are usually brighter than the surrounding environment and have salient features. In this paper, a fast saliency map of pedestrian and vehicle targets in infrared images at night is used to achieve rapid acquisition of areas of interest for pedestrians and vehicles. Based on this, we propose a method to refine and separate the target area to obtain accurate pedestrian and vehicle candidate bounding boxes. Specifically, this paper proposed a multi-feature fusion algorithm of pedestrian and vehicle feature extraction combined with support vector machine (SVM) to determine whether the extracted target area really includes pedestrians and vehicles. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve the expected effect of the classification and detection for pedestrians and vehicles at night, and can meet the real-time requirements of actual road scenarios.