A new edge feature for head-shoulder detection

In this work, we introduce a new edge feature to improve the head-shoulder detection performance. Since Head-shoulder detection is much vulnerable to vague contour, our new edge feature is designed to extract and enhance the head-shoulder contour and suppress the other contours. The basic idea is that head-shoulder contour can be predicted by filtering edge image with edge patterns, which are generated from edge fragments through a learning process. This edge feature can significantly enhance the object contour such as human head and shoulder known as En-Contour. To evaluate the performance of the new En-Contour, we combine it with HOG+LBP [1] as HOG+LBP+En-Contour. The HOG+LBP is the state-of-the-art feature in pedestrian detection. Because the human head-shoulder detection is a special case of pedestrian detection, we also use it as our baseline. Our experiments have indicated that this new feature significantly improve the HOG+LBP.