FPGA Implementation of Multi-scale Pedestrian Detection in Thermal Images

Abstract In this paper an embedded vision system for human silhouette detection in thermal images is presented. As the computing platform a reprogrammable device (FPGA – Field Programmable Gate Array) is used. The detection algorithm is based on a sliding window approach, which content is compared with a probabilistic template. Moreover, detection is four scales in supported. On the used test database, the proposed method obtained 97% accuracy, with average one false detection per frame. Due to the used parallelization and pipelining real-time processing for 720 × 480 @ 50 fps and 1280 × 720 @ 50 fps video streams was achieved. The system has been practically verified in a test setup with a thermal camera.