A probabilistic framework for car detection in images using context and scale

David Held, Jesse Levinson, Sebastian Thrun

Abstract: Detecting cars in real-world images is an important task for autonomous driving, yet it remains unsolved. The system described in this paper takes advantage of context and scale to build a monocular single-frame image-based car detector that significantly outperforms the baseline. The system uses a probabilistic model to combine multiple forms of evidence for both context and scale to locate cars in a real-world image. We also use scale filtering to speed up our algorithm by a factor of 3.3 compared to the baseline. By using a calibrated camera and localization on a road map, we are able to obtain context and scale information from a single image without the use of a 3D laser. The system outperforms the baseline by an absolute 9.4% in overall average precision and 11.7% in average precision for cars smaller than 50 pixels in height, for which context and scale cues are especially important.