Symmetry Information Based Fuzzy Clustering for Infrared Pedestrian Segmentation

Abstract

Pedestrian detection in infrared images is always a challenging task. Segmentation is an important step of pedestrian detection. An accurate segmentation could provide more information for further analysis. In this paper, an improved Fuzzy C-Means clustering method, which incorporates geometric symmetry information, is proposed for infrared pedestrian segmentation. In the proposed method, symmetry information is introduced by Markov random field theory. Moreover, a new metric is utilized to handle the weak symmetry of pedestrian. In addition, a whole procedure is proposed to extract infrared pedestrians. The experimental results indicate that our method performs better for infrared pedestrian segmentation and obtains better segmentation results compared with other state-of-the-art methods.