Partial Occlusion Handling in Pedestrian Detection With a Deep Model

Part-based models have demonstrated their merit in object detection. However, there is a key issue to be solved on how to integrate the inaccurate scores of part detectors when there are occlusions, abnormal deformations, appearances, or illuminations. To handle the imperfection of part detectors, this paper presents a probabilistic pedestrian detection framework. In this framework, a deformable part-based model is used to obtain the scores of part detectors and the visibilities of parts are modeled as hidden variables. Once the occluded parts are identified, their effects are properly removed from the final detection score. Unlike previous occlusion handling approaches that assumed independence among the visibility probabilities of parts or manually defined rules for the visibility relationship, a deep model is proposed in this paper for learning the visibility relationship among overlapping parts at multiple layers. The proposed approach can be viewed as a general postprocessing of part-detection results and can take detection scores of existing part-based models as input. The experimental results on three public datasets (Caltech, ETH, and Daimler) and a new CUHK occlusion dataset (http://www.ee.cuhk.edu.hk/similar to xgwang/CUHK_pedestrian.html), which is specially designed for the evaluation of occlusion handling approaches, show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.