Random Forest with Adaptive Local Template for Pedestrian Detection

Pedestrian detection with large intraclass variations is still a challenging task in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel pedestrian detection method based on Random Forest. Firstly, we generate a few local templates with different sizes and different locations in positive exemplars. Then, the Random Forest is built whose splitting functions are optimized by maximizing class purity of matching the local templates to the training samples, respectively. To improve the classification accuracy, we adopt a boosting-like algorithm to update the weights of the training samples in a layer-wise fashion. During detection, the trained Random Forest will vote the category when a sliding window is input. Our contributions are the splitting functions based on local template matching with adaptive size and location and iteratively weight updating method. We evaluate the proposed method on 2 well-known challenging datasets: TUD pedestrians and INRIA pedestrians. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance.