Pedestrian Detection in Thermal Images using Saliency Maps

Thermal images are mainly used to detect the presence of people at night or in bad lighting conditions, but perform poorly at daytime. To solve this problem, most state-of-the-art techniques employ a fusion network that uses features from paired thermal and color images. Instead, we propose to augment thermal images with their saliency maps, to serve as an attention mechanism for the pedestrian detector especially during daytime. We investigate how such an approach results in improved performanc...