The Combinator: Optimal Combination of Multiple Pedestrian Detectors

In recent years, the accuracy of pedestrian detectors significantly improved. Currently, state-of-the-art pedestrian detectors achieve high accuracy results on challenging datasets. As opposed to refining a single detector, in this paper we propose a different approach to further increase the detection accuracy: combining multiple pedestrian detectors. The most straight-forward way to combine pedestrian detectors would be a naive AND or OR combination. Here, we present a novel generic combination framework in which we exploit specific information from each pedestrian detector to determine the optimal combination parameters. Our main motivation for this approach is based on the fact that several pedestrian detection approaches are based on very different techniques (e.g. a different feature pool), and thus an efficient combination should yield higher accuracy results. Indeed, such a combination is far more powerful, and our experiments indicate that specific (that is, cleverly chosen) combinations outperform existing state-of-the-art pedestrian detection results.