Cooperative multi-scale Convolutional Neural Networks for person detection

Robust person detection is required by many computer vision applications. We present a deep learning approach, that combines three Convolutional Neural Networks to detect people at different scales, which is the first time that a multi-resolution model is combined with deep learning techniques in the pedestrian detection domain. The networks learn features from raw pixel information, which is also rare for pedestrian detection. Due to the use of multiple Convolutional Neural Networks at different scales, the learned features are specific for far, medium, and near scales respectively, and thus, the overall performance is improved. Furthermore, we show, that neural approaches can also be applied successfully for the remaining processing steps of classification and non-maximum suppression. The evaluation on the most popular Caltech pedestrian detection benchmark shows that the proposed method can compete with state of the art methods without using Caltech training data and without fine tuning. Therefore, it is shown that our method generalizes well on domains it is not trained on.