Post-processing approaches for improving people detection performance

• A people detection filtering subtask with people-background segmentation.
• Fusion of seven independent people detectors at decision-level.
• Extensive evaluation of proposed people detection post-processing approaches.

People detection in video surveillance environments is a task that has been generating great interest. There are many approaches trying to solve the problem either in controlled scenarios or in very specific surveillance applications. We address one of the main problems of people detection in video sequences: every people detector from the state of the art must maintain a balance between the number of false detections and the number of missing pedestrians. This compromise limits the global detection results. In order to reduce or relax this limitation and improve the detection results, we evaluate two different post-processing subtasks. Firstly, we propose the use of people-background segmentation as a filtering stage in people detection. Then, we evaluate the combination of different detection approaches in order to add robustness to the detection and therefore improve the detection results. And, finally, we evaluate the successive application of both post-processing approaches. Experiments have been performed on two extensive datasets and using different people detectors from the state of the art: the results show the benefits achieved using the proposed post-processing techniques.