A new benchmark for stereo-based pedestrian detection

Pedestrian detection is a rapidly evolving area in the intelligent vehicles domain. Stereo vision is an attractive sensor for this purpose. But unlike for monocular vision, there are no realistic, large scale benchmarks available for stereo-based pedestrian detection, to provide a common point of reference for evaluation. This paper introduces the Daimler Stereo-Vision Pedestrian Detection benchmark, which consists of several thousands of pedestrians in the training set, and a 27-min test drive through urban environment and associated vehicle data. The data, including ground truth, is made publicly available for non-commercial purposes. The paper furthermore quantifies the benefit of stereo vision for ROI generation and localization; at equal detection rates, false positives are reduced by a factor of 4-5 with stereo over mono, using the same HOG/linSVM classification component.