Pedestrian recognition using high-definition LIDAR

Pedestrian detection is one of the key technologies for autonomous driving systems and driving assistance systems. To predict the possibility of a future collision, these systems have to accurately recognize pedestrians as far away as possible. Moreover, the function to detect not only people walking but also people who are standing near the road is also required. This paper proposes a method for recognizing pedestrians by using a high-definition LIDAR. Two novel features are introduced to improve the classification performance. One is the slice feature, which represents the profile of a human body by widths at the different height levels. The other is the distribution of the reflection intensities of points measured on the target. This feature can contribute to the pedestrian identification because each substance has its own unique reflection characteristics in the near-infrared region of the laser beam. Our approach applies a support vector machine (SVM) to train a classifier from these features. The classifier discriminates the clusters of the laser range data that are the pedestrian candidates, generated by pre-processing. A quantitative evaluation in a road environment confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method.