Robust real-time pedestrian detection on embedded devices

Detection of pedestrians on embedded devices, such as those on-board of robots and drones, has many applications including road intersection monitoring, security, crowd monitoring and surveillance, to name a few. However, the problem can be challenging due to continuously-changing camera viewpoint and varying object appearances as well as the need for lightweight algorithms suitable for embedded systems. This paper proposes a robust framework for pedestrian detection in many footages. The framework performs fine and coarse detections on different image regions and exploits temporal and spatial characteristics to attain enhanced accuracy and real time performance on embedded boards. The framework uses the Yolo-v3 object detection [1] as its backbone detector and runs on the Nvidia Jetson TX2 embedded board, however other detectors and/or boards can be used as well. The performance of the framework is demonstrated on two established datasets and its achievement of the second place in CVPR 2019 Embedded Real-Time Inference (ERTI) Challenge. © 2021 SPIE.