What is this blog gonna be about?

Hello everyone!

My name is Pedro Silva, I'm 24 years old and I study Mechanical Engineering in Aveiro University, Portugal. On the next few months I will be working on my final project to obtain my master's degree.

The title of the project is "Visual Recognition of Pedestrians for a Driver Assistance System" and my main goal is to create a software application that uses Computer Vision tools to detect pedestrians on images of urban setting. This application is to be tested and (hopefully) validated in the ATLASCAR, which is an on-going project of the Mechanical Engineering Department with the goal of creating an autonomous driving car. This car has participated in several robotics competitions with many prizes won.

In this blog I will be making regular updates of the development of my work. I will be writing in English so that the content can be accessible to anyone, and hopefully get some feedback !

Pedestrian Detection is a discipline that has been subject to a great deal of research and investigation in the past decade, and because of that the development of this technology has been extraordinary. After conducting some literature review I was able to create a work plan.

As a first step, I will implement the Integral Channel Features, an algorithm that takes advantage of the wealth of information contained in various channels of an image. The paper describing this method can be found here.

Since this method runs at a slow rate, due to the need to evaluate each image several times at different scales, I will then implement the FPDW - Fastest Pedestrian Detector of the West. This algorithm speeds up the process through a number of simplifications and approximations made on the first one. It is documented that this method runs at 6 FPS on 640x480 sized images.

I will be developing the program under ROS (C++) environment and at the moment I've assembled a platform for advertising, subscribing, processing and publishing images, which will be the base of all the future work.

My introductory presentation that was made for the laboratory's team can be downloaded here, although it is in Portuguese.

And this is it.

Regards!