Fused DNN: A deep neural network fusion approach to fast and robust pedestrian detection

We propose a deep neural network fusion architecture for fast and robust pedestrian detection. The proposed network fusion architecture allows for parallel processing of multiple networks for speed. A single shot deep convolutional network is trained as a object detector to generate all possible pedestrian candidates of different sizes and occlusions. This network outputs a large variety of pedestrian candidates to cover the majority of ground-truth pedestrians while also introducing a large number of false positives. Next, multiple deep neural networks are used in parallel for further refinement of these pedestrian candidates. We introduce a soft-rejection based network fusion method to fuse the soft metrics from all networks together to generate the final confidence scores. Our method performs better than existing state-of-the-arts, especially when detecting small-size and occluded pedestrians. Furthermore, we propose a method for integrating pixel-wise semantic segmentation network into the network fusion architecture as a reinforcement to the pedestrian detector. The approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on most protocols on Caltech Pedestrian dataset, with significant boosts on several protocols. It is also faster than all other methods.