Multi-spectral Vehicle Detection based on Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

This paper presents a unified framework for joint Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based vehicle detection by leveraging multi-spectral image pairs. With the observation that under challenging environments such as night vision and limited light source, vehicle detection in a single color image can be more tractable by using additional far-infrared (FIR) image, we design joint CNN architecture for both RGB and FIR image pairs. We assume that a score map from joint CNN applied to overall image can be considered as confidence of vehicle existence. To deal with various scale ratios of vehicle candidates, multi-scale images are first generated scaling an image according to possible scale ratio of vehicles. The vehicle candidates are then detected on local maximal on each score maps. The generation of overlapped candidates is prevented with non-maximal suppression on multi-scale score maps. The experimental results show that our framework have superior performance than conventional methods with a joint framework of multi-spectral image pairs reducing false positive generated by conventional vehicle detection framework using only single color image.