Dariu M. Gavrila

Bio: Dariu M. Gavrila is an academic researcher from Delft University of Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Object detection & Pedestrian detection. The author has an hindex of 46, co-authored 124 publications receiving 12775 citations. Previous affiliations of Dariu M. Gavrila include University of Maryland, College Park & University of Amsterdam.

Monocular Pedestrian Detection: Survey and Experiments

Abstract: Pedestrian detection is a rapidly evolving area in computer vision with key applications in intelligent vehicles, surveillance, and advanced robotics. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the current state of the art from both methodological and experimental perspectives. The first part of the paper consists of a survey. We cover the main components of a pedestrian detection system and the underlying models. The second (and larger) part of the paper contains a corresponding experimental study. We consider a diverse set of state-of-the-art systems: wavelet-based AdaBoost cascade, HOG/linSVM, NN/LRF, and combined shape-texture detection. Experiments are performed on an extensive data set captured onboard a vehicle driving through urban environment. The data set includes many thousands of training samples as well as a 27-minute test sequence involving more than 20,000 images with annotated pedestrian locations. We consider a generic evaluation setting and one specific to pedestrian detection onboard a vehicle. Results indicate a clear advantage of HOG/linSVM at higher image resolutions and lower processing speeds, and a superiority of the wavelet-based AdaBoost cascade approach at lower image resolutions and (near) real-time processing speeds. The data set (8.5 GB) is made public for benchmarking purposes.

3-D model-based tracking of humans in action: a multi-view approach

Abstract: We present a vision system for the 3-D model-based tracking of unconstrained human movement. Using image sequences acquired simultaneously from multiple views, we recover the 3-D body pose at each time instant without the use of markers. The pose-recovery problem is formulated as a search problem and entails finding the pose parameters of a graphical human model whose synthesized appearance is most similar to the actual appearance of the real human in the multi-view images. The models used for this purpose are acquired from the images. We use a decomposition approach and a best-first technique to search through the high dimensional pose parameter space. A robust variant of chamfer matching is used as a fast similarity measure between synthesized and real edge images. We present initial tracking results from a large new Humans-in-Action (HIA) database containing more than 2500 frames in each of four orthogonal views. They contain subjects involved in a variety of activities, of various degrees of complexity, ranging from the more simple one-person hand waving to the challenging two-person close interaction in the Argentine Tango.

Real-time object detection for "smart" vehicles

Abstract: This paper presents an efficient shape-based object detection method based on Distance Transforms and describes its use for real-time vision on-board vehicles. The method uses a template hierarchy to capture the variety of object shapes; efficient hierarchies can be generated offline for given shape distributions using stochastic optimization techniques (i.e. simulated annealing). Online, matching involves a simultaneous coarse-to-fine approach over the shape hierarchy and over the transformation parameters. Very large speed-up factors are typically obtained when comparing this approach with the equivalent brute-force formulation; we have measured gains of several orders of magnitudes. We present experimental results on the real-time detection of traffic signs and pedestrians from a moving vehicle. Because of the highly time sensitive nature of these vision tasks, we also discuss some hardware-specific implementations of the proposed method as far as SIMD parallelism is concerned.

An Experimental Study on Pedestrian Classification

Abstract: Detecting people in images is key for several important application domains in computer vision. This paper presents an in-depth experimental study on pedestrian classification; multiple feature-classifier combinations are examined with respect to their ROC performance and efficiency. We investigate global versus local and adaptive versus nonadaptive features, as exemplified by PCA coefficients, Haar wavelets, and local receptive fields (LRFs). In terms of classifiers, we consider the popular support vector machines (SVMs), feedforward neural networks, and k-nearest neighbor classifier. Experiments are performed on a large data set consisting of 4,000 pedestrian and more than 25,000 nonpedestrian (labeled) images captured in outdoor urban environments. Statistically meaningful results are obtained by analyzing performance variances caused by varying training and test sets. Furthermore, we investigate how classification performance and training sample size are correlated. Sample size is adjusted by increasing the number of manually labeled training data or by employing automatic bootstrapping or cascade techniques. Our experiments show that the novel combination of SVMs with LRF features performs best. A boosted cascade of Haar wavelets can, however, reach quite competitive results, at a fraction of computational cost. The data set used in this paper is made public, establishing a benchmark for this important problem

Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection

Abstract: We study the question of feature sets for robust visual object recognition; adopting linear SVM based human detection as a test case. After reviewing existing edge and gradient based descriptors, we show experimentally that grids of histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) descriptors significantly outperform existing feature sets for human detection. We study the influence of each stage of the computation on performance, concluding that fine-scale gradients, fine orientation binning, relatively coarse spatial binning, and high-quality local contrast normalization in overlapping descriptor blocks are all important for good results. The new approach gives near-perfect separation on the original MIT pedestrian database, so we introduce a more challenging dataset containing over 1800 annotated human images with a large range of pose variations and backgrounds.

Are we ready for autonomous driving? The KITTI vision benchmark suite

Abstract: Today, visual recognition systems are still rarely employed in robotics applications. Perhaps one of the main reasons for this is the lack of demanding benchmarks that mimic such scenarios. In this paper, we take advantage of our autonomous driving platform to develop novel challenging benchmarks for the tasks of stereo, optical flow, visual odometry/SLAM and 3D object detection. Our recording platform is equipped with four high resolution video cameras, a Velodyne laser scanner and a state-of-the-art localization system. Our benchmarks comprise 389 stereo and optical flow image pairs, stereo visual odometry sequences of 39.2 km length, and more than 200k 3D object annotations captured in cluttered scenarios (up to 15 cars and 30 pedestrians are visible per image). Results from state-of-the-art algorithms reveal that methods ranking high on established datasets such as Middlebury perform below average when being moved outside the laboratory to the real world. Our goal is to reduce this bias by providing challenging benchmarks with novel difficulties to the computer vision community. Our benchmarks are available online at: www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Abstract: Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding

Abstract: Visual understanding of complex urban street scenes is an enabling factor for a wide range of applications. Object detection has benefited enormously from large-scale datasets, especially in the context of deep learning. For semantic urban scene understanding, however, no current dataset adequately captures the complexity of real-world urban scenes. To address this, we introduce Cityscapes, a benchmark suite and large-scale dataset to train and test approaches for pixel-level and instance-level semantic labeling. Cityscapes is comprised of a large, diverse set of stereo video sequences recorded in streets from 50 different cities. 5000 of these images have high quality pixel-level annotations, 20 000 additional images have coarse annotations to enable methods that leverage large volumes of weakly-labeled data. Crucially, our effort exceeds previous attempts in terms of dataset size, annotation richness, scene variability, and complexity. Our accompanying empirical study provides an in-depth analysis of the dataset characteristics, as well as a performance evaluation of several state-of-the-art approaches based on our benchmark.

Shape matching and object recognition using shape contexts

Abstract: We present a novel approach to measuring similarity between shapes and exploit it for object recognition. In our framework, the measurement of similarity is preceded by: (1) solving for correspondences between points on the two shapes; (2) using the correspondences to estimate an aligning transform. In order to solve the correspondence problem, we attach a descriptor, the shape context, to each point. The shape context at a reference point captures the distribution of the remaining points relative to it, thus offering a globally discriminative characterization. Corresponding points on two similar shapes will have similar shape contexts, enabling us to solve for correspondences as an optimal assignment problem. Given the point correspondences, we estimate the transformation that best aligns the two shapes; regularized thin-plate splines provide a flexible class of transformation maps for this purpose. The dissimilarity between the two shapes is computed as a sum of matching errors between corresponding points, together with a term measuring the magnitude of the aligning transform. We treat recognition in a nearest-neighbor classification framework as the problem of finding the stored prototype shape that is maximally similar to that in the image. Results are presented for silhouettes, trademarks, handwritten digits, and the COIL data set.