A new pixel-based fusion framework to enhance object detection in automotive applications

Modern cooperative Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs) require efficient algorithms and methods for the real-time processing of all sensor data. In particular, systems for combination of different sensors are gaining increasing importance. This paper proposes an early fusion technique to combine the advantages of two or more vision sensors. It creates a single composite image that will be more comprehensive for further computer vision tasks, e.g. Object Detection. After image registration, the presented pixel-based fusion framework transforms the registered sensor images into a common representational format by a multiscale decomposition. A denoising and a multiscale edge detection are applied on the transformed data. Only data with a high Activity Level are considered for the fusion process that based on a probabilistic approach. Finally, the fused image can be the input for a subsequent feature extraction task. The proposed fusion technique is examined on a Pedestrian Detection System based on an infrared and a visible light camera.