PedHunter: Occlusion Robust Pedestrian Detector in Crowded Scenes

Abstract: Pedestrian detection in crowded scenes is a challenging problem, because occlusion happens frequently among different pedestrians. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient detection network to hunt pedestrians in crowd scenes. The proposed method, namely PedHunter, introduces strong occlusion handling ability to existing region-based detection networks without bringing extra computations in the inference stage. Specifically, we design a mask-guided module to leverage the head information to enhance the feature representation learning of the backbone network. Moreover, we develop a strict classification criterion by improving the quality of positive samples during training to eliminate common false positives of pedestrian detection in crowded scenes. Besides, we present an occlusion-simulated data augmentation to enrich the pattern and quantity of occlusion samples to improve the occlusion robustness. As a consequent, we achieve state-of-the-art results on three pedestrian detection datasets including CityPersons, Caltech-USA and CrowdHuman. To facilitate further studies on the occluded pedestrian detection in surveillance scenes, we release a new pedestrian dataset, called SUR-PED, with a total of over 162k high-quality manually labeled instances in 10k images. The proposed dataset, source codes and trained models will be released.