A Survey of Deep Learning Approaches for Pedestrian Detection in Autonomous Systems

This paper surveys real-time object detection literature critically and analytically, focusing particularly on pedestrian detection for safe autonomous vehicles. It addresses the challenges in the domain, some of the sources of which are variations in age, gender, clothing, lighting, backgrounds, and occlusion. The paper reviews object detection algorithms after providing an overview of deep learning basics and main architectures of neural networks, followed by discussion on existing algorithms along with their strengths, weaknesses, and future research directions. There is a need for pedestrian detection datasets with further complex annotations and multi-source integration, which captures interactions between pedestrians and their surroundings. Incorporating advanced sensors, including LiDAR, infrared, and depth sensors, as the foremost means to enhance the detection capabilities in more adverse conditions, such as low-light situations and occlusion. However, architectures such as YOLO, SSD, and Faster R-CNN, which have led to current improvements in performance, still allow room for improving pedestrian detection accuracy. By filling in these insights and proposed solutions, the paper focus on the development of pedestrian detection technology, how it can be brought into a safer, reliable, real-world applicability towards the system of autonomous driving. All of these results point to continued innovation towards deep learning, multi-sensor integration, and developing datasets to achieve optimal performance levels in real world conditions for autonomous driving systems.