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Presently, many researchers and engineers have investigated autonomous driving, which has significantly influenced the revolution of artificial intelligence (AI). One of the critical challenges for autonomous driving is the inadequate precision of autonomous vehicles in detecting pedestrians, which is a major safety hazard to human beings. In this paper, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) demonstration system with a normalization-based validity index (NbVI) has been proposed for real-time pedestrian detection. The proposed algorithm can accurately detect pedestrians by calculating the Manhattan distance between the target histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features and real-time pedestrian HOG features. In lieu of sophisticated circuit layout and substantial training burden with neuron computation circuit, the proposed detection system with adaptive features clustering is hardware-friendly and is capable of real-time pedestrian detection using fewer training images with high detection rate (up to 99.2%). Moreover, the function execution time of pedestrian detection is shortened by 25% using FPGA acceleration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel visual-inertial odometry (VIO) approach that adopts structural regularity in man-made environments. Instead of using Manhattan world assumption, we use Atlanta world model to describe such regularity. An Atlanta world is a world that contains multiple local Manhattan worlds with different heading directions. Each local Manhattan world is detected on the fly, and their headings are gradually refined by the state estimator when new observations are received. With full exploration of structural lines that aligned with each local Manhattan worlds, our VIO method becomes more accurate and robust, as well as more flexible to different kinds of complex man-made environments. Through benchmark tests and real-world tests, the results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing visual-inertial systems in large-scale man-made environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]