Bispectral Pedestrian Detection Augmented with Saliency Maps using Transformer

In this paper, we focus on the problem of automatic pedestrian detection for surveillance applications. Particularly, the main goal is to perform real-time detection from both visible and thermal cameras for complementary aspects. To handle that, a fusion network that uses features from both inputs and performs augmentation by means of visual saliency transformation is proposed. This fusion process is incorporated into YOLO-v3 as base architecture. The resulting detection model is trained in a paired setting in order to improve the results compared to the detection of each single input. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed fusion framework, several experiments are conducted on KAIST multi-spectral dataset. From the obtained results, it has been shown superior results compared to single inputs and to other fusion schemes. The proposed approach has also the advantage of a very low computational cost, which is quite important for real-time applications. To prove that, additional tests on a security robot are presented as well.