An efficient human detection method for multi-pedestrian tracking

Traditional human detection using pre-trained detectors tends to be computationally intensive for time-critical tracking tasks, and the detection rate is prone to be unsatisfying when occlusion, motion blur and body deformation occur frequently. A spatial-confidential proposal filtering method (SCPF) is proposed for efficient and accurate human detection. It consists of two filtering phases: spatial proposal filtering and confidential proposal filtering. A compact spatial proposal is generated in the first phase to minimize the search space to reduce the computation cost. The human detector only estimates the confidence scores of the candidate search regions accepted by the spatial proposal instead of global scanning. At the second phase, each candidate search region is assigned with a supplementary confidence score according to their reliability estimated by the confidential proposal to reduce missing detections. The performance of the SCPF method is verified by extensive tests on several video sequences from available public datasets. Both quantitatively and qualitatively experimental results indicate that the proposed method can highly improve the efficiency and the accuracy of human detection.