A multiple kernel learning approach to multi-modal pedestrian classification

Pedestrian detection is a key problem in many computer vision applications, especially in surveillance and security systems. To this end, information integration from different imaging modalities, such as thermal infrared and visible spectrum, can significantly improve the detection rate in respect to mono-modal strategies. For this reason, an effective fusion scheme is necessary to combine the information presented by multiple sensors. In this paper, we propose a pedestrian classification method based on the multiple kernel learning framework; standard pixel features (such as spatial derivatives) from both imaging modalities are employed to learn several feature-related basic kernels and a compound kernel is found as an optimized linear combination of basic kernels. Finally the compound kernel is used to train an SVM. Experiments performed on the OTCBVS dataset [1], demonstrate that our recipe definitely outclasses a wide set of literature fusion modalities.