This dissertation presents an integrated human shape modeling, detection, and body part localization vision system. It demonstrates that the system can (1) detect pedestrians in various shapes, sizes, postures, partial occlusion, and clothing from a moving vehicle using stereo cameras; (2) locate the joints of a person automatically and accurately without employing any markers around the joints.; The following contributions distinguish this dissertation from previous work: (1) Dressed human modeling and dynamic model assembling: Unlike previous work that employs a fixed human body model or global deformable template to perform human detection, in this dissertation merged body parts are introduced to represent the deformations caused by clothing, segmentation errors, or low image resolution. A dressed human model is dynamically assembled from the model parts in the recognition step; the shapes of the body parts and the size and spatial relationships between them (the contextual information) are represented as invariant under translation, rotation, and scaling. Therefore, the system can detect people in different clothes, positions, sizes, and orientations. (2) Bayesian similarity measure: A probabilistic similarity measure is derived from the human model that combines the local shape and global relationship constraints to guide body part identification and human detection. Thus, the identification of a part does not only depend on its own shape but also the contextual constraints from other parts. In contrast with previous work, the proposed similarity measure enables efficient shape matching and comparison robust to articulation, partial occlusion, and segmentation errors through coarse-to-fine human model assembling. (3) Recursive context reasoning algorithm: Contour-based human detection depends on reliable contour extraction, but contour extraction is an under-constrained problem without the knowledge about the objects to be detected. Unlike previous work that assumes perfect and complete contours are available, this dissertation proposes a recursive context reasoning (RCR) algorithm to solve the above dilemma. A contour updating procedure is introduced to integrate the human model and the identified body parts to predict the shapes and locations of the parts missed by the contour detector; the refined contours are used to reevaluate the Bayesian similarity measure and to determine if a person is present or not. Therefore, contour extraction, body part localization, and human detection are improved iteratively.
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