Feature Selection Based on Tensor Decomposition and Object Proposal for Night-Time Multiclass Vehicle Detection

Night-time vehicle detection is essential in building intelligent transportation systems (ITS) for road safety. Most of current night-time vehicle detection approaches focus on one or two classes of vehicles. In this paper, we present a novel multiclass vehicle detection system based on tensor decomposition and object proposal. Commonly used features such as histogram of oriented gradients and local binary pattern often produce useless image blocks (regions), which can result in unsatisfactory detection performance. Thus, we select blocks via feature ranking after tensor decomposition and only extract features from these selected blocks. To generate windows that contain all vehicles, we propose a novel object-proposal approach based on a state-of-the-art object-proposal method, local features, and image region similarity. The three terms are summed with learned weights to compute the reliability score of each proposal. A bio-inspired image enhancement method is used to enhance the brightness and contrast of input images. We have built a Hong Kong night-time multiclass vehicle dataset for evaluation. Our proposed vehicle detection approach can successfully detect four types of vehicles: 1) car; 2) taxi; 3) bus; and 4) minibus. Occluded vehicles and vehicles in the rain can also be detected. Our proposed method obtains 95.82% detection rate at 0.05 false positives per image, and it outperforms several state-of-the-art night-time vehicle detection approaches.