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HAPNet: a head-aware pedestrian detection network associated with the affinity field

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Abstract

Pedestrian detection has made great progress with the rapid development of deep learning, but pedestrian detection under occlusion remains a challenge. To solve the occlusion problem, some research endeavors have been carried out based on visible parts, such as the body, but there is still substantial room for improvement due to the introduction of additional calculation. Aiming to improve the detection performance under occlusion, this paper proposes a head-aware pedestrian detection network (HAPNet) by using the inherent structural relationship between the human body and head. The postprocessing stage is redesigned to include a scoring module and an augmented non-maximum suppression (NMS) algorithm. Specifically, HAPNet detects head and body simultaneously through different layers of a feature map. We then propose a head-side affinity model, which can represent the association between the head and body sides. Detection and affinity prediction tasks are implemented through different branches of HAPNet. In the scoring module, the head and body detection scores are fused to match the head-body pairs to improve the detection performance. On this basis, an enhanced NMS algorithm is proposed, which achieves a good balance between reducing false positives and missing detection. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of this method in pedestrian detection under occlusion.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. L201022) and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61876112, 61976170).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Engineering, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 100048, China

    Jiali Ding, Tie Liu & Yuanyuan Shang

  2. College of Artificial Intelligence, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Yun Zhao & Zejian Yuan

Authors
  1. Jiali Ding
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  2. Tie Liu
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  3. Yun Zhao
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  4. Zejian Yuan
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  5. Yuanyuan Shang
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Tie Liu or Zejian Yuan.

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Ding, J., Liu, T., Zhao, Y. et al. HAPNet: a head-aware pedestrian detection network associated with the affinity field. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 65, 160102 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-021-3300-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-021-3300-2

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