Improving the Generalization Properties of Neural Networks: an Application to Vehicle Detection

In this paper a multilayer feedforward neural network based approach for vehicle detection is proposed. The main idea is to use such network to perform both feature extraction and classification. This simplicity enables real time applications. In order to achieve such capabilities, the network is trained by a new algorithm, proposed in this paper, named minimization of inter-class interference (MCI). Such algorithm aims to create a hidden space (i.e. feature space) where the patterns have a desirable statistical distribution. Regarding the neural architecture, the linear output layer is replaced by the Mahalanobis kernel, in order to improve generalization. Experiments are performed by means of a dataset that includes two standard datasets from Caltech car rear. Finally, disturbed images are used, in order to evaluate the robustness of the neural-network based vehicle detection. The proposed method reveals low miss rate, low false alarm rate and high area under ROC curve. In Matlab environment, the algorithm spends only 3.280e-4 seconds per image. These facts encourage this research line.