Boosted Sigma Set for Pedestrian Detection

This paper presents a new method to detect pedestrian in still image using Sigma sets as image region descriptors in the boosting framework. Sigma set encodes second order statistics of an image region implicitly in the form of a point set. Compared with the covariance matrix, the traditional second order statistics based region descriptor, which requires computationally demanding operations based on Riemannian manifold, Sigma set preserves similar robustness and discriminative power more efficiently because the classification on Sigma sets can be directly performed in vector space. Experimental results on the INRIA and the Daimler Chrysler pedestrian datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.