Novel and efficient pedestrian detection using bidirectional PCA

The detection of pedestrian has attracted much research in the past decade due to the essential role it plays in intelligent video surveillance and vehicle vision systems. However, the existing algorithms do not meet the requirement of real applications in terms of detection performance. This paper proposes a new robust algorithm for pedestrian detection based on image reconstruction using bidirectional PCA (BDPCA). Unlike PCA, since it is a straightforward image projection technique, BDPCA preserves the shape structure of objects and is computationally effective. Due to these advantages, BDPCA is a promising tool for object detection and recognition. The algorithm was tested on two datasets, INRIA and PennFudanPed. Our experiment proved that using BDPCA with vertical edge images was the most suitable for pedestrian detection. The comparison between BDPCA, PCA, and histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) based methods demonstrates superior accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm to the others.