An embedded real-time pedestrian detection system using an infrared camera

An FPGA-based implementation of a pedestrian detection system using thermal infrared imaging is presented. The main feature of the processing platform is its ability to detect pedestrians at frame-rate from an infrared video stream. It is designed as a stand alone processing unit, supporting security systems in low visibility conditions. The processing unit digitizes a video source from a thermal infrared camera and after preprocessing, provides features of the detected pedestrians such as their position, height and width to a host computer where visualization of tracking and statistical operations can be applied to the received data. The data is transmitted to the host PC via a Bluetooth module interfaced to the development board. The wireless communication allows also for remote control of the processing system´s configuration registers. At the present stage of evaluation, the processing unit is limited to detect and transmit the coordinates of one pedestrian in a video frame. The system was implemented using a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro XC2VP30 FPGA chip, no additional memory is required.