Parzen method for fusion of laserscanner data: Application to pedestrian detection

This article deals with the detection of pedestrians by means of a laser sensor. This sensor placed on the front of a vehicle collects information about distance distributed according to 4 horizontal planes. Like a vehicle, a pedestrian constitutes in the vehicle environment an obstacle which must be detected, located, then identified and tracked if necessary. In order to improve the robustness of pedestrian detection using a single laser sensor this article propose a detection system based on the fusion of information located in the 4 horizontal laser planes. A "Parzen Window" kernel method is described and allows the centralized fusion of different planes. Many experimental results validate and show the relevance of our pedestrian detection algorithm in regard to a method using only a single-row laser-range scanner.