Pedestrian Detection in Thermal Images Using Deep Saliency Map and Instance Segmentation

Pedestrian detection is an established instance of computer vision task. Pedestrian detection from the color images has achieved robust performance but in the night time or in bad light conditions it has low detection accuracy. Thermal images are used for detecting people at night time, foggy weather or in bad lighting situations when color images have a lower vision. But in the daytime where the surroundings are warm or warmer than pedestrians then the thermal image has lower accuracy. Hence thermal and color image pair can be a solution but it is expensive to capture color-thermal pair and misaligned imagery can cause low detection accuracy. We proposed a network that achieved better accuracy by extending the prior works which introduced the use of the saliency map in pedestrian detection tasks from the thermal images into instance-level segmentation. We worked on a subdivision of KAIST Multispectral Pedestrian Detection Dataset [8] which has pixel-level annotations. We have trained Mask-RCNN for pedestrian detection task and report the added effect of saliency maps generated using PiCA-Net. We have achieved an accuracy of 88.14% over day and 91.84% over night images. So, our model has reduced the miss rate by 24.1% and 23% over the existing state-of-the-art method in day and night images.