Contour-Guided Spectral Routing for Robust Real-Time Pedestrian Detection

arXiv:2609.14383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time pedestrian detection in driving scenes is constrained by three coupled failure modes: tiny targets lose discriminative evidence, occlusion weakens geometric support, and weather or illumination changes distort appearance statistics. We formulate the detector through a unified contour-guided spectral routing view rather than treating frequency processing, attention, and boundary reasoning as independent add-ons. The detector routes information in a prescribed order: spatial evidence is first augmented with global spectral context, deep representations then exchange spatial and spectral cues, and cross-scale fusion is finally conditioned on boundary--semantic disagreement. This ordering yields a compact representation pipeline in which low-frequency context stabilizes global structure while high-frequency evidence protects small-object contours. We further retain a wavelet-subband training transformation that perturbs low- and high-frequency coefficients independently, targeting appearance shifts caused by fog, rain, snow, and low illumination. The formulation exposes a single routing variable at each stage and distinguishes reusable signal transforms from the task-specific policy that decides where each signal is injected. On CityPersons, the proposed detector obtains 70.4 AP_{50} and 44.2 AP_{50:95}, compared with 68.1 and 42.2 for RT-DETR, while the full wavelet-augmented configuration reaches 71.1 and 44.6.

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-09-15

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