Deep Learning-Based Pedestrian Detection in Autonomous Vehicles: Substantial Issues and Challenges

In recent years, autonomous vehicles have become more and more popular due to their broad influence over society, as they increase passenger safety and convenience, lower fuel consumption, reduce traffic blockage and accidents, save costs, and enhance reliability. However, autonomous vehicles suffer from some functionality errors which need to be minimized before they are completely deployed onto main roads. Pedestrian detection is one of the most considerable tasks (functionality errors) in autonomous vehicles to prevent accidents. However, accurate pedestrian detection is a very challenging task due to the following issues: (i) occlusion and deformation and (ii) low-quality and multi-spectral images. Recently, deep learning (DL) technologies have exhibited great potential for addressing the aforementioned pedestrian detection issues in autonomous vehicles. This survey paper provides an overview of pedestrian detection issues and the recent advances made in addressing them with the help of DL techniques. Informative discussions and future research works are also presented, with the aim of offering insights to the readers and motivating new research directions.