Multidomain Joint Learning of Pedestrian Detection for Application to Quadrotors

Pedestrian detection and tracking are critical functions in the application of computer vision for autonomous driving in terms of accident avoidance and safety. Extending the application to drones expands the monitoring space from 2D to 3D but complicates the task. Images captured from various angles pose a great challenge for pedestrian detection, because image features from different angles tremendously vary and the detection performance of deep neural networks deteriorates. In this paper, this multiple-angle issue is treated as a multiple-domain problem, and a novel multidomain joint learning (MDJL) method is proposed to train a deep neural network using drone data from multiple domains. Domain-guided dropout, a critical mechanism in MDJL, is developed to self-organize domain-specific features according to neuron impact scores. After training and fine-tuning the network, the accuracy of the obtained model improved in all the domains. In addition, we also combined the MDJL with Markov decision-process trackers to create a multiobject tracking system for flying drones. Experiments are conducted on many benchmarks, and the proposed method is compared with several state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that the MDJL effectively tackles many scenarios and significantly improves tracking performance.