K-Means and DNN-Based Novel Approach to Human Identification in Low Resolution Thermal Imagery

In this chapter, a human detection system based on unsupervised learning method K-means clustering followed by deep learning approach You Only Look Once (YOLO) on thermal imagery has been proposed. Generally, images in the visible spectrum are used to conduct such human detection, which are not suitable for nighttime due to low visibility, hence for evaluation of our system. Hence, long wave infrared (LWIR) images have been used to implement the proposed work in this chapter. The system follows a two-step approach of generating anchor boxes using K-means clustering and then using those anchor boxes in 252 layered single shot detector (YOLO) to predict proper boundary boxes. The dataset of such images is provided by FLIR company. The dataset contains 6822 images for training purposes and 757 images for the validation. This proposed system can be used for real-time object detection as YOLO can achieve much higher rate of processing when compared to traditional method like HAAR cascade classifier in long wave infrared imagery (LWIR).