As Unmanned Aerial Systems grow in numbers, pedestrian detection from aerial platforms is becoming a topic of increasing importance. By providing greater contextual information and a reduced potential for occlusion, the aerial vantage point provided by Unmanned Aerial Systems is highly advantageous for many surveillance applications, such as target detection, tracking, and action recognition. However, due to the greater distance between the camera and scene, targets of interest in aerial imagery are generally smaller and have less detail. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN’s) have demonstrated excellent object classification performance and in this paper we adopt them to the problem of pedestrian detection from aerial platforms. We train a CNN with five layers consisting of three convolution-pooling layers and two fully connected layers. We also address the computational inefficiencies of the sliding window method for object detection. In the sliding window configuration, a very large number of candidate patches are generated from each frame, while only a small number of them contain pedestrians. We utilize the Edge Box object proposal generation method to screen candidate patches based on an "objectness" criterion, so that only regions that are likely to contain objects are processed. This method significantly reduces the number of image patches processed by the neural network and makes our classification method very efficient. The resulting two-stage system is a good candidate for real-time implementation onboard modern aerial vehicles. Furthermore, testing on three datasets confirmed that our system offers high detection accuracy for terrestrial pedestrian detection in aerial imagery.

Date Published: 12 May 2016
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 9844, Automatic Target Recognition XXVI, 98440G (12 May 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2223270

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9844:
Automatic Target Recognition XXVI
Firooz A. Sadjadi; Abhijit Mahalanobis, Editor(s)