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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS: SYSTEMS
Animal–Vehicle Collision Mitigation
System for Automated Vehicles
Abdelhamid Mammeri, Depu Zhou, and Azzedine Boukerche
Abstract—Detecting large animals on roadways using auto-
mated systems such as robots or vehicles is a vital task. This
can be achieved using conventional tools such as ultrasonic
sensors, or with innovative technology based on smart cam-
eras. In this paper, we investigate a vision-based solution. We
begin the paper by performing a comparative study between
three detectors: 1) Haar-AdaBoost; 2) histogram of oriented
gradient (HOG)-AdaBoost; and 3) local binary pattern (LBP)-
AdaBoost, which were initially developed to detect humans and
their faces. These detectors are implemented, evaluated, and com-
pared to each other in terms of accuracy and processing time.
Based on our evaluation and comparison results, we design a
two-stage architecture which outperforms the aforementioned
detectors. The proposed architecture detects candidate regions
of interest using LBP-AdaBoost in the first stage, which offers
robustness to false positives in real-time conditions. The sec-
ond stage is based on support vector machine classifiers that
were trained using HOG features. The training data are gener-
ated from our novel dataset called large animal dataset, which
contains common and thermographic images of large road-
animals. We emphasize that no such public dataset currently
exists.
Index Terms—Animal–vehicle collisions (AVCs) detection,
automated systems, obstacle detection and avoidance.
I. I NTRODUCTION
ITH the rapid advances in technology, there is a
W concerted determination to use automatic systems to
increase driver aptitude in safety tasks such as driving vehi-
cles. Automatic collision avoidance systems are intended to
assist drivers in obstacle detection and avoidance [1]. The
animal–vehicle collision (AVC) avoidance system is an exam-
ple of such systems, which serve to enhance the safety of
roadway users and increase highway throughput.
AVCs are challenging issues for vehicles, particularly in
rural regions of North America and Europe. They account for
about 200 human deaths, 29 000 injuries, and $1.1 billion in
property damage every year in the U.S. [2]. Similar situations
are encountered in Europe, Africa, and Asia. For instance,
Manuscript received November 4, 2014; revised March 7, 2015; accepted
July 31, 2015. This work was supported in part by the Canada Research Chair
Programs, in part by the DIVA Strategic Research Network, and in part by the
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. This paper
was recommended by Associate Editor E. Tunstel.
The authors are with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada (e-mail:
amammeri@uottawa.ca).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSMC.2015.2497235
2168-2216 c 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
some European countries witnessed more than 507 000 colli-
sions, resulting in around 300 human fatalities, 30 000 human
injuries, and more than $1 billion in damages every year.
Over the last decade, many AVC mitigation architectures
have been proposed in [3] and [4]. These architectures can be
grouped into two main categories: 1) passive methods, which
use deterrence to keep large animals away from roadways and
2) active methods, based on animal detection. Passive methods
make use of deterrence strategies to warn animals; an exam-
ple of this is the use of ultrasonic noise such as whistles (e.g.,
Hornet V120 [3]), or the generation of high intensity lights
from vehicles, which increase the distance from which they
may be perceived by animals. Other earlier and inefficient
techniques, such as electronic mats, animal reflectors, road-
side refractors, and break the beam methods, have also been
used to keep animals away from roads. It is observed in [4]
that the most effective way to reduce the number of AVCs is
to detect animals using cameras, rather than relying on deter-
rence strategies. This is because camera-based systems are the
most efficient and accurate way to see around regions under
investigation in order to reduce AVCs. However, the disad-
vantages of camera-based solutions lie in the fact that they
focus on animals within the road, and ignore those outside
the field of investigation. These systems also fail to detect
animals on curve-lanes. Deterrence methods (e.g., ultrasonic
devices), on the other hand, require a clear line of sight to
establish beam connections. Another problem is their false
activation by smaller species of animals, air movement, or
humans, which results in false alarms. The advantage of these
systems is that they are relatively insensitive to changes in tem-
perature. In this paper, we focus only on the active methods
from a computer-vision perspective. To detect the presence of
animals, vision-based detection systems use visible range cam-
eras, thermographic cameras, radars, or lasers. These devices
are installed inside cars or along roadsides. When a large ani-
mal is detected, drivers are notified through a warning message
from a car dashboard system, or through flashing roadside
signs.
In this research paper, based on [5], we explore the detec-
tion of roadway animals using a camera-based architecture.
We begin this paper with a comparative study between
three detectors: 1) Haar-AdaBoost; 2) histogram of ori-
ented gradient (HOG)-AdaBoost; and 3) local binary pattern
(LBP)-AdaBoost, all of which were originally developed
to detect humans and their faces. We then evaluate and
compare these detectors in terms of accuracy and process-
ing time. Additionally, we compare these detectors to the
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS: SYSTEMS
well-known HOG-SVM approach. Based on the evaluation
results, we propose a two-stage architecture that outperforms
the aforementioned schemes Haar-AdaBoost, HOG-AdaBoost,
LBP-AdaBoost, and HOG-SVM. All of these detectors were
evaluated and tested in different daytime and nighttime condi-
tions. Our two-stage architecture exhibits good performance in
daytime conditions; however, at nighttime, it is less efficient.
The first stage, i.e., LBP-Adaboost, is used to detect regions
of interests (ROIs) that potentially contain large animals. The
second stage is based on support vector machine (SVM)
classifiers that were trained using HOG increases the detec-
tion rate, particularly in daytime conditions, as explained in
Section VIII [6].
To train our classifiers and to test the aforementioned archi-
tectures, we have created a new dataset called large animal
dataset (LADSet). We emphasize that no such public dataset
for large animals exists in the literature. This dataset is fre-
quently updated by the addition of new images. To perform
our experiments, we have focused mainly on lateral views of
moose; the lateral position is the most common for animals to
take when crossing roadways. Other uncommon postures of
animals, such as posterior view and the recumbent position,
are left to our future work.
We begin this paper by reviewing the most important
research works on large animal detection in Section II, and
presenting the animal detection scenario in Section III. Next, in
Section IV, we introduce our dataset, which primarily consists
of Internet images and video frames. In Section V, the three
features used to detect animals are briefly explained. The main
algorithms used in training are then introduced in Section VI.
The three detectors constructed in this paper are explained
and compared to each other in Section VII. To address the
problems found with these detectors, we propose a two-stage
architecture in Section VIII. In Section IX, we investigate
nighttime conditions, and suggest a new system. We conclude
our paper with some useful remarks that outline our future
work in Section X.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Surprisingly, large animal detection in the automotive con-
text has not received great deal of interest from the human-
machine systems community, despite the existence of some
AVC mitigation architectures. In fact, almost all of these
papers present some countermeasures that are mainly used to
prevent collisions; however, they do not address the detection
algorithms of AVC systems (see [3], [4]). The only excep-
tion comes from [7], in which a contour-based HOG-SVM
method is developed to detect deer. In this section, we review
the detection and recognition methods for large animals in
general applications. Haar-like features, originally developed
to detect human faces, are explored in [8] to detect the faces
of lions. Indeed, these features are extracted from a color map
calculated from the difference between the R and G color chan-
nels, instead of being extracted from gray images as performed
in [9]. These features are trained using the AdaBoost algo-
rithm. A combination of the Kanade–Lucas–Tomasi method
is used to track animal faces. It is stated in [8] that this
method of extracting features improves the robustness of the
lion-face detector against shadow and illumination changes in
natural scenes. However, no performance results are drawn
in [8] to support this claim. Moreover, this method only con-
siders the anterior view of lions, making it vulnerable to
situations in which animal faces are not available. In [10],
a Haar-based method that builds visual models of animals is
proposed. This method is based on the assumption that ani-
mals can be represented by many segments signifying different
body parts, as already performed by part-based methods to
detect humans in [5] and [11]. To identify animals in [10],
three different techniques are used: 1) histograms of textons;
2) intensity-normalized patch pixel values; and 3) the scale
invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptor. Three classifiers
are also tested: 1) K-way logistic regression; 2) SVMs; and
3) K-nearest neighbors (KNN). It is reported that KNN, with
K = 1, performs better than SVM and K-way logistic regres-
sion. Despite the good performance of the proposed system,
some limitations are still found. For instance, its application
is restricted to lateral views of animals. Additionally, this sys-
tem is only appropriate for frames with mono-targeted animals.
The authors also use SIFT, which is considered slow compared
to the HOG method. This is because SIFT is a local descriptor
which only computes the gradient histogram for blocks around
specific interest points, while HOG is computed for an entire
image. HOG also performs better than SIFT in terms of its
false positive rate (FPR). Haar-like features are used to detect
and identify African penguins by their chest pattern in [12],
based on the presence of black chest spots in adult penguins.
AdaBoost algorithm is used to train the penguins’ features.
The system proposed in [12] does not work for penguins that
change their feather pattern, for penguins with extraordinary
patterns or for posterior views.
A two-stage strategy architecture is developed in [7]. It
begins by segmenting images into many regions according to
their grayscale values. Contours of animals are found using a
contour finding function. After the generation of ROIs, they are
resized in such a way that may contain the contour of animals.
In the second stage, HOG has been applied to detect animals
without any adaptation, leading to unoptimized results. In this
paper, an extensive set of experiments are conducted to select
the best parameters from HOG that yield optimized results.
In [7], HOG features are extracted from ROIs instead of the
entire image. For animal identification, a linear SVM classi-
fier is used. In general, the system proposed in [7] fails to
detect animals at longer distances. Moreover, directly apply-
ing HOG without tuning its parameters leads to unoptimized
results. Instead of extracting Haar features from gray or color
images as performed originally in [13], Zhang et al. [14], [15]
extracted Haar features from four channels to capture local pat-
terns. These features, which are essentially Haar-like features,
are renamed in [15] as Haar of oriented gradients (HOOG).
HOOG is used to handle the shape and variation in texture
of the animal head. The classification stage jointly captures
shape and texture features; a second step, called deformable
detection, is then performed. The role of this second step is
to handle the spatial misalignment observed between the out-
put of shape and texture detectors. The results shown in [14]
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MAMMERI et al.: AVC MITIGATION SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATED VEHICLES
Fig. 1. Scenario of animal detection using roadside cameras. When a roadside
camera detects an animal, it sends a warning message to the flashing system.
are very promising, since they consider both texture and edge
information. However, this paper is validated only by using
still images (obtained from the Internet) of animals’ heads.
Aside from texture and shape, color hue can also be used to
detect animals, particularly in daylight. For instance, the work
in [16] starts by preprocessing the input images to reduce the
amount of processed data. The color space Luv is used, and
the mean-shift clustering algorithm is applied to the prepro-
cessed images to perform color segmentation. This approach
uses training images to obtain a color model for an ani-
mal. Unfortunately, this method is only applicable to daytime
conditions, and does not seem adaptable to night conditions.
Khorrami et al. [17] proposed a method that is capable of
detecting multiple types of animals using principal compo-
nents analysis (PCA). PCA is a mathematical technique used
to reduce data dimensionality. After detecting animals, local
entropy and connected component analysis are used to isolate
the foreground, containing animals from the background. At
the end, large displacement optical flow is applied to ensure
that areas in the frames correspond to large changes in veloc-
ity. The mentioned works indicate that gradient features can
also be used alongside color or texture features. This is due to
the fact that gradient features, such as HOG, are invariant to
scale and illumination, and are hence well suited to nighttime
applications.
III. A NIMAL D ETECTION S CENARIO
In this paper, the proposed architecture can be implemented
in a dashboard system or in roadside units (RSUs). Stationary
cameras are installed at the roadside; when a large animal
enters their field of view, the cameras detect the animal and
notify upcoming vehicles through flashing signs installed on
the roadside (see Fig. 1). Approaching drivers, after seeing the
flashing signs, immediately reduce their vehicle’s speed and
make appropriate decisions to avoid a collision. If a dashboard
camera (see Fig. 2) is installed inside the vehicle, flashing
signs are not necessary. The dashboard camera will detect ani-
mals crossing the roadway, and will notify the driver through
a warning message.
We have successfully tested our proposed architecture on
many videos and images taken from moving dashboard and
RSU cameras. The detection of road-faring animals by station-
ary or mobile cameras is a challenge due to several undesirable
factors. These factors are mainly related to the surrounding
3
Fig. 2. Example (video) of large animal detection using our architecture
proposed in this paper.
environment, camera resolution, vehicle mobility, and the large
intraclass variability between different types of large animals.
The detection of large animals imposes several new chal-
lenges compared to the detection of human faces or pedestri-
ans. Human faces have a relatively fixed texture features that
can be accurately described by Haar features, as shown in [9].
The HOG descriptor was originally developed to detect pedes-
trians, since their outlines are nearly invariable even when they
are walking in different directions. It is shown in [18] that
HOG outperforms most object detection algorithms. With large
animals, however, colors and outlines vary greatly. Compared
to human faces and heads, which are almost unique and
standard, animal faces and heads have greater variation in
appearance. Furthermore, human faces are characterized by
skin texture, while the texture of animals’ faces are more var-
ied and complex [14]. Moreover, the body of a large animal
exhibits high variability within the same class (e.g., moose),
and between animals of different classes. This is due to the
fact that animals possess specific properties including texture,
height, shape, and different views (posterior, anterior, and lat-
eral), that distinguish them from others. The effective use of
those features to detect large animals is a challenging issue,
and is largely discussed in this paper.
IV. DATASET C REATION
We created our dataset (called LADSet) from a large set
of images and videos collected mainly from the Internet [6].
Collecting videos directly from nature is challenging, and to
the best of our knowledge, no such public dataset exists.
Approximately 20 h of various videos were selected, contain-
ing images of large animals such as moose, elk, horses, cows,
and deer in residential areas, zoos, or forests. Particular interest
was given to large animals crossing rural roads and highways,
and to videos recorded from moving vehicles. This reflects real
situations, and helps improve system performance. Moreover,
videos with different weather conditions (rain, sun, and snow)
are considered. The collected videos were downloaded from
video websites (e.g., Youtube and Youku) and converted to
image format using the ratio of 1:4 continuous video frames
to avoid repeated sampling. For nighttime conditions, a small
dataset was constructed; it is explained in Section IX.
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS: SYSTEMS

Fig. 3. HTR shape category images taken from LADSet. Fig. 4. HTL shape category images taken from LADSet.

A North American moose stands 1.4–2.1 m high at shoul-

der height; the length from head to tail, however, lies between
2.4–3.2 m [19]. Other Cervidae animals such as black-tailed
deer, elk, donkey, young horses, and caribou have simi-
lar body ratios, and are considered in our dataset. Based
on these general characteristics, we select the image aspect
ratio that matches animals’ natural sizes. Hence the image
aspect ratio width:height = 7:5 is adopted. The size of the
images collected from the Internet varies from 42 × 30 to
560 × 400 pixels. These images are normalized to 21 × 15,
28 × 20, 35 × 25, and 56 × 40 pixels. All images are anno-
tated and aligned manually. We noticed that each image should
contain a 10% boundary area around the body of the animal
(around 5–7 pixels for the size of 56×40 pixels), which allows
for the use of edge detectors [20].
Unlike pedestrian datasets (see [21], [22]) which take into Fig. 5. Example of images taken from the negative dataset.
consideration very limited human poses, the process of design-
ing a LADSet is a challenging task; this is because it should
consider different categories of large animals with diverse pos- B. Negative Animal Dataset Images
tures. Therefore, as a first step toward the creation of this
dataset in this first version, we consider the following two main A good negative dataset helps improve the performance
categories of lateral view shapes shown in Figs. 3 and 4: “head of the detector by reducing the set of false positives. The
to left” (HTL) and “head to right” (HTR). The justification most crucial point is that the target object (i.e., animals)
behind this choice is that these postures are the most frequently are not included in the negative dataset. Any other animals,
encountered shapes on roads. However, some uncommon pos- such as small dogs, cats, etc., are excluded from the nega-
tures of animals such as posterior view, anterior view, and the tive dataset. This is because they may have similar shapes to
reclining position will be considered in a future version of large animals. In addition, images that contain road objects
our dataset. This is because these animal postures are rarely such as vehicles, pedestrians, traffic signs, road surfaces,
encountered in roads. The current version of the LADSet con- grass, houses, trees, etc., are considered in the dataset. These
tains training and testing datasets, which include positive and images should consider different types of illumination and
negative images. other environmental conditions. We collected around 10 000
background images; 7000 were used in the training pro-
cess; and 31 712 small negative images were used for false
A. Positive Animal Dataset Images positive testing. A sample of the negative dataset is shown
After completing the video collection, we cut the standard in Fig. 5.
image from the sampled video frames using the aspect ratio When comparing detectors in Section VII, we divide the
(width:height = 7:5). As previously mentioned, the window testing samples into ten nonoverlapping subsets; that is, ten
size was determined by the size of the animal’s body, plus 10% groups of 711 positive images for computing true detec-
of the margin. Our positive training dataset mainly includes tion/miss rates and ten groups of 3171 negative images for
moose and deer, in addition to some other large animals such computing false positive detection rates. The average mean
as horse, caribou, etc. It contains 3462 images equally divided values of each detector are recorded and compared accord-
into the HTL and HTR categories (see Figs. 3 and 4). ingly, as shown in Table II.
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MAMMERI et al.: AVC MITIGATION SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATED VEHICLES
Fig. 6. Image representation of MB-LBP feature with a block size of 3 × 2.
Compared to the original LBP with 3 × 3 pixels, MB-LBP can capture large-
scale structures.
V. F EATURES E XTRACTION
In this paper, we used three features to describe large ani-
mals: LBP, HOG, and Haar. A brief description of these
features is given in the following sections [6].
A. LBP Features
The LBP is a simple and powerful texture descriptor used
to discover and summarize local patterns in frames. Each pixel
is described by its relative gray level to its direct neighboring
pixels using the original basic version of LBP, or to indirectly
neighboring pixels using the extended LBP version. If the
intensity of the neighboring pixel pn is lower than the inten-
sity of the center pixel pc , it is set to zero; otherwise, it is set
to one. Consequently, each pixel is represented by a binary
code. For instance, for a region of 3 × 3 pixels, the LBP code
 (xc , yc ) is expressed in its decimal form as:
of its pixel center
LBP(xc , yc ) = 7i=0 S(pn − pc ) × 2i , where S(v) = 1 if v ≥ 0,
and 0 otherwise.
More distinctive block features, called multiblock
LBP (MB-LBP) features, were proposed in [23]. Here,
the authors applied MB-LBP and AdaBoost learning methods
to face detection, which perform better than the original LBP
features and Haar-like features. The basic idea of MB-LBP is
that the simple binary difference rule that works in a single
pixel is transferred to a block, which may have a different
size. This means that the MB-LBP operator is defined by
comparing the central block intensity bc with those of its
eight neighborhood blocks b0 , . . . , b7 (see Fig. 6). The size
of the blocks considered in this paper varies from 1 × 1
to 5 × 5 pixels. Furthermore, we only apply LBP(8,1) as
the operator of MB-LBP. This is because the larger blocks
have very limited descriptive functions compared with
adjacent blocks.The final binary sequence can be obtained
as MB-LBP = 7i=0 S(bi − bc ) × 2i , where bc is the average
intensity of the central block and bi (i = 0, . . . , 7) is the
average intensity of the neighbor block i.
In this paper, we consider MB-LBP for animal detection,
and we use the AdaBoost algorithm in order to select an opti-
mal set of local regions and their weights (see Section VI).
By doing this, a smaller MB-LBP features set, which repre-
sents animals, may be generated and compared to instances in
which earlier versions of LBP are used.
B. HOG Features
HOGs [18] is a gradient-based method initially proposed for
the detection of pedestrians. Usually the first step of HOG is
gamma and color normalization of the input image. The hori-
zontal and vertical gradients of each pixel are then computed
5
TABLE I
D IFFERENT PARAMETERS OF HOG D ESCRIPTORS U SED TO S ELECT A
C OMBINATION T HAT Y IELDS THE B EST P ERFORMANCE R ESULTS
FOR D ETECTING A NIMALS . T HE R ESULTS OF V IDEO T EST
S PEEDS C OME F ROM THE S AME V IDEO (L ENGTH : 57 S ,
S IZE : 320 × 240, T OTAL F RAMES : 1027)
Fig. 7. Comparison between different parameters of HOG.
using the 1-D mask [−1 0 1] as shown in [18]. The image
is then divided into a set of cells with a size of 8 × 8 pixels.
After that, four adjacent cells are regrouped to form a block.
For each cell, the histogram of gradient with nine orientation
bins is computed for later use as a descriptor block. This is per-
formed by accumulating votes into bins for each orientation.
The vote is weighted by the magnitude of a gradient at each
pixel. Finally, when all histograms are computed, the descrip-
tor vector is built into a single vector, and cell histograms are
normalized. For normalization purposes, cell histograms are
organized into blocks of 16 × 16 pixels. L1-norm, L1-sqrt,
L2-norm, and L2-hys can be applied to normalize the gradi-
ent intensity (to make the feature vector space robust to local
illumination changes). Once this normalization step has been
performed, all the histograms can be concatenated into a single
feature vector.
The parameters of HOG, as defined in [18], yield a good
performance when used to detect pedestrians. In this paper,
we vary the parameters of HOG in order to obtain the com-
bination that yields the best performance in detecting large
animals using many videos and images (see Table I). We
show in Table I and Fig. 7 that HOG1 performs better
than HOG2–HOG5 in terms of both detection speed and
low FPRs. On the other hand, HOG3 has the highest true
positive rate; unfortunately, it is extremely slow (343 ms)
compared to HOG1, HOG2, HOG4, and HOG5. Its FPR is
also high, thus it does not meet the requirements of our
entire system. Hence, HOG1 parameters are used in our
experiments.
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS: SYSTEMS
Fig. 8. Example of Haar features shown in the detection Window, for
instance: edge features (a, d), line features (b, c, e) and center-surround
features (f) [9], [13], [24].
C. Haar Features
Haar-like features are a set of 2-D Haar functions used to
encode the texture of objects [13] in images. Each Haar-like
feature consists of at least two adjacent “black" and “white"
rectangles. The value of a Haar-like feature is then found by
computing the difference between the sum of the pixel values
within black and white rectangular regions. Originally, two
kinds of Haar features were introduced in [13], as shown in
Fig. 8(a) and (b). These features were first extended in [9], to
include a third feature as shown in Fig. 8(c); in [24] they were
extended to contain a tilted (45◦ ) Haar-like feature as shown
in Fig. 8(d)–(f).
The set of the basic Haar features extracted from a given
image is extremely large. For instance, in a sub-window of
24 × 24 pixels, more than 45 000 Fig. 8(a)–(c) types of Haar
features were computed. A convenient and fast method for
computing the huge number of Haar-like features is through
the integral image. In this paper, the features shown in
Fig. 8(a) and (b), and a tilted (90◦ ) version of them, are
used to represent animals. After that, we trained them using
the AdaBoost algorithm as performed in [9] to detect large
animals.
VI. C LASSIFICATION
In this paper, AdaBoost is used to separately train the three
aforementioned features: 1) Haar; 2) MB-LBP; and 3) HOG.
AdaBoost is extremely simple to use and to implement, and
often yields very effective results.
A. AdaBoost Algorithm
Given T weak classifiers ht (each of them represented by
one feature: HOG, MB-LBP, or Haar) learned through an iter-
ative process, the strong classifier is then formed through a
linear combination of weak classifiers
 T 
 ht (x) = aj ,
H(x) = sign αt .ht (x) (1)
t=1
where αt refers to the weight of each weak classifier found in
the boosting process and x represents the input sub-window,
ht is a weak classifier generated by a single feature. The weight
coefficients are computed by an iterative process as described
in [9]. Assuming each feature is considered a weak classi-
of powerful weak classifiers from the enormous amount of
feature sets; this function gives each selected weak classifier a
specific weight to form a final strong classifier. The detection
process is quite similar to Haar-AdaBoost proposed in [9].
B. AdaBoost Training
1) Weak Classifiers: As we know, the sets of Haar,
MB-LBP, and HOG features computed over a given image
are extremely large. For instance, in a sub-window of
20 × 20 pixels, we may find 45 891 Haar-like features,
3600 MB-LBP features, and 576 HOG features. Although the
number of feature MB-LBP, and HOG is much lower than
Haar-like features, the three descriptors contain a considerable
amount of redundant information. For instance, the features
that only appear in the background are useless. The AdaBoost
algorithm is then used to select significant features and to
construct a powerful binary classifier.
In this paper, each single feature (i.e., Haar, HOG, or
MB-LBP) is used as a weak classifier to separate positive
from negative images. For each weak classifier, an optimal
threshold classification function is defined with the purpose of
maximizing the classification ability and minimizing the num-
ber of misclassified sub-windows. For that purpose, we define
a weak classifier by ht ; this consists of a feature ft , a threshold
θt and a coefficient factor pt which indicates the direction of
the inequality sign (“<” or “>” between ft and θt ), as per-
formed in [25]. Equation (2) defines the optimal threshold
classification function for a weak classifier as follows:

1, if pt ft (x) < pt θt
ht (x) = (2)
0, otherwise
where x is a sub-window of an input image, ft indicates the
tth Haar feature or the HOG histogram bin value (we use Hk,t
instead of ft to illustrate the tth histogram bin value in the kth
cell when extracting HOG weak classifier). If we apply the
AdaBoost algorithm on MB-LBP features, it will be difficult
to use the threshold classification function, since the value
of MB-LBP features is nonmetric. As performed in [23], the
weak classifier known as the decision tree or regression tree is
applied. Hence, the multibranch tree is adopted to design the
weak classifiers based on MB-LBP features. The multibranch
tree has 256 branches, each of which correspond to a certain
discrete value of MB-LBP features [23]. The weak classifier
(in the case of MB-LBP features) is defined as
⎧
⎪
⎪ a0 , if xk = 0
⎪
⎪
⎨ · · ·
if xk = j (3)
⎪
⎪
⎪···
⎪
⎩
a255 , if xk = 255
where xk is the kth element of feature vector x and aj , ( j =
0, . . . , 255) are regression parameters learned in the AdaBoost
training process. We calculate the best tree-based weak clas-
sifier just as we would learn a node in a decision tree [23].
The minimization of (3) gives the following parameters:
fier, the total number of each type of feature in a certain   k 
image would be extremely large. For each type of feature, i wi yi δ xi = j
aj =   k  . (4)
the AdaBoost training function aims to select a small number i wi δ xi = j
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MAMMERI et al.: AVC MITIGATION SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATED VEHICLES 7

Obviously, the parameters aj ∈ [−1, +1]. aj > 0 indicates that Algorithm 1: Cascade Classifier
the tth MB-LBP feature extracted from a positive sample is 1 Input: Detection sub-window
greater than that which is extracted from a negative sample. 2 Output: Detection result: Positive or Negative
Thus, when ht (x) is greater than a threshold TLBP , we say that 3 for i = 1; i ≤ N; i + + do
the input window x represents a true animal. Otherwise, it is 4 Si = 0
Initialize the calculation result Si for stage i/N classifier.
not considered to be an animal. 5 for t = 1; t ≤ T; t + + do
2) HOG-AdaBoost Algorithm: With the SVM classifier, 6 Si = Si + αj hj (x)
all the 36N 1 (N is the number of blocks) HOG vectors are where ht (x) is the t/T weak classifier, namely the tth
extracted to participate in the classification process. However, selected feature in this stage.
7 end
in the case of the AdaBoost algorithm, only a small set of 8 if Si ≥ Thresholdi then
histogram values, known as weak classifiers, are used. This 9 RESULT ← TRUE
means that each single histogram value in one bin of the cell The looping would continue
has classification capabilities. Actually, in each cell, we have 10 end
nine weak classifiers, each of which corresponds to one bin. 11 else
12 RESULT ← FALSE
The AdaBoost algorithm aims to pick up the most powerful skip detection and the result is negative.
weak classifiers from the 36N histogram bins. We set a thresh- 13 end
old θt for each bin value; we then compared the value Hk,t 14 end
(which indicates the tth histogram bin value in the kth cell) 15 return RESULT
of the input image to the threshold θt (which corresponds to
the tth feature); this was done based on (2) using hk,t (x) = 1
if pt Hk,t (x) < pt θt , and 0, otherwise. Finally, we combined
the selected weak classifiers into a strong final one. A num-
ber of trained, strong AdaBoost classifiers can be linked by a
“cascade” algorithm to get a more efficient and accurate
classifier, as explained in the next section.
3) Cascade of AdaBoost Classifiers: A cascade of classi-
fiers was constructed in order to improve detection perfor-
mance and reduce processing time. The word cascade means
that the resulting classifier consists of several simple classifiers
Fig. 9. Number of features chosen by each stage for the three classifiers.
applied subsequently to an input window, until the recogni-
tion or rejection of the target takes place. In this paper, the
AdaBoost training algorithm was applied to each stage. The referred in this paper as “Haar-AdaBoost,” “LBP-AdaBoost,”
key principle is that the simple, but efficient, AdaBoost clas- and “HOG-AdaBoost.”
sifiers are arranged at early stages to reject many negative Fig. 9 shows the number of features selected at each stage.
sub-windows and to accept almost all positive sub-windows. The classifier HOG-AdaBoost uses the largest number of weak
The subsequent complicated and strong classifiers aim to classifiers in each stage; the LBP cascade classifier uses less
achieve low FPRs. Algorithm 1 shows the pseudo-code of the than ten features in earlier stages, and around 17 in later stages;
cascade classifier [9]. and the Haar detector chooses from 15 to 56 features. Before
4) Classifier Training: We assume that we need to train a we conducted a comparison, we observed that LBP features
classifier with N stages. The
FPR and the detection
N rate of were the most powerful and efficient features compared to
the classifier are then: F = N i=1 f i and T = i=1 t i , where HOG and Haar.
F and T are the desired FPR and the accuracy rate, respec-
tively; fi and ti are, respectively, the FPR and the detection VII. C OMPARISON B ETWEEN D ETECTORS
rate of the ith stage classifier. If we intend our classifier to
To evaluate the performance of each detector, two main cri-
achieve a detection rate of 90% (for the whole 20 stages), the
teria were considered: 1) detection accuracy and 2) processing
minimum bit rate of each stage should be: log0.9 20 ≈ 0.995.
time. We tested these detectors on more than 7000 testing still
At the same time, if we define the FPR of each classifier
images and on 13 sequences of video (see Figs. 2 and 16–18)
stage as ≤ 50%, the maximum FPR should be less than
under different weather conditions. The experiments were per-
0.5020 ≈ 0.95 × 10−6 . This is considered to be a very low
formed on an Intel core i5-2450M 2.50 GHz dual-core with
FPR. Note that F and T rates are not the final performance
4 GB of RAM.
rates of our architecture; they are estimated rates obtained from
the training dataset. Recall that in this paper, Haar, MB-LBP
A. Processing Time
and HOG features are trained separately in our image dataset
using the AdaBoost learning algorithm. These classifiers are In order to measure the time required to recognize animals
in a given scene, otherwise known as processing time, we
1 Assume we have N blocks in an image window, and that each block choose continuously playing video instead of a single image to
contains four cells divided into nine bins; the final HOG feature vectors should simulate a real-time situation (as shown in Figs. 2, 17, and 18).
be a dimension of N × 4 × 9 = 36N. We tested each detector (i.e., HOG-AdaBoost, Haar-AdaBoost,
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8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS: SYSTEMS
Fig. 10. Processing time per frame: input video size: 320 × 240; total
frame number: 1026; initial (minimal) detection window size: 56 × 40;
scale rate: 1.05.
Fig. 11. Average processing time of HOG-AdaBoost, Haar-AdaBoost,
MB-LBP-AdaBoost, and HOG-SVM.
and MB-LBP-AdaBoost) on each video to record the pro-
cessing time required to recognize animals. We then plotted
Figs. 10 and 11. Fig. 10 illustrates the specific detection time
needed for each frame; Fig. 11, however, shows the average
processing time of each detector, calculated from Fig. 10.
Fig. 11 shows that the Haar-AdaBoost detector consumes
the most time (89.0 ms) compared to the other two detec-
tors; conversely, HOG-AdaBoost performs the best (49.1 ms).
However, it performs faster than LBP-AbaBoost by just 8 ms
per frame, when only considering the speed criterion. The
explanation for this finding can be understood below. In fact,
calculating a single feature (Haar or LBP) is more compli-
cated than calculating an HOG feature when the HOG block
size is very small. Moreover, LBP-AdaBoost is faster than
Haar-AdaBoost for two reasons. First, LBP is a binary feature
compared to Haar, which is integer-based. Extracting LBP fea-
tures is, therefore, less-time consuming than extracting Haar
features. Second, the total number of features in the LBP cas-
cade classifier is much lower than those in the Haar cascade
classifier (see Fig. 9). We note that even HOG-AdaBoost has a
significant number of false positive results (see Fig. 12) which
reduces its speed; however, it remains the fastest option. Our
first observation can be summarized as follows. Besides the
“minimum initial window size” and “scale rate,” the speed of
the cascaded classifiers is directly related to the image feature
Fig. 12. Video detection results using (from left to right) Haar-AdaBoost,
HOG-AdaBoost, and LBP-AdaBoost.
Fig. 13. Evaluation results of HOG-AdaBoost, Haar-AdaBoost,
MB-LBP-AdaBoost, and HOG-SVM.
types, the number of features (weak classifiers) triggered per
sub-window, and the quantity of final “positive” results.
In Fig. 11, we also show the performance of the three detec-
tors compared to the well-known HOG-SVM. The processing
time required for HOG-SVM to detect animals seems to be
higher than that of the three detectors.
B. Detection Accuracy
We ran each classifier several times on positive and nega-
tive images of LADSet, separately, with different scale rates.
We then recorded whether the positive sample was identified,
and how many false positive results were obtained. After sev-
eral experiments, we plotted the detection error tradeoff (DET)
curves on a log-linear coordinate, i.e., the “miss rate versus
false positives per image (FPPI)” curve of each detector, as
illustrated in Fig. 13.
Fig. 13 shows that LBP-AdaBoost and Haar-AdaBoost
detectors outperform HOG-AdaBoost, especially for low FPPI
values. Meanwhile, the former detector performs slightly bet-
ter than the latter when the FPPI rate is greater than 10−3 .
In addition, the LBP-AdaBoost detector has a relatively low
miss rate of around 30% compared to the 45% miss rate of
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MAMMERI et al.: AVC MITIGATION SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATED VEHICLES 9

TABLE II
the Haar-AdaBoost, when the FPPI rate is less than 10−4 . We S OME I NFORMATION C OMPARISONS FOR H AAR , LBP, AND HOG
have also noticed that the Haar-AdaBoost classifier curve can
achieve an extremely low miss rate; at this point, the system
can recognize 7030/7110 positive samples, but has more than
3000 false positive results in 31 712 negative images.
On the other hand, if FPPI is greater than 10−3 ,
LBP-AdaBoost and Haar-AdaBoost methods have compara-
ble miss rates. However, as Haar-AdaBoost consumes much
more time than LBP-Adaboost (as shown in Figs. 10 and 11),
and has a significant number of false positives (see Table II),
LBP-AdaBoost can be considered the best solution, followed
by Haar-AdaBoost. The video detection results of Fig. 12 show
a clear difference in performance between the three detectors.
The LBP-AdaBoost detector wins the comparison in terms of
true positive results and false negative misjudgment. In addi-
tion, the Haar-AdaBoost detector obtains better results than
the HOG-AdaBoost detector, particularly when considering
FPRs. The three aforementioned schemes are also compared
to the well-known HOG-SVM in terms of accuracy of detec-
tion (see Fig. 13). Again, LBP-AdaBoost seems to be the most
accurate scheme compared to the three other detectors. On the
other hand, HOG-SVM only outperforms the HOG-AdaBoost
detector. If we associate the evaluation results of Fig. 13 with Fig. 14. Architecture design of the two-stage animal detection system.
Fig. 9, we find that LBP features are very efficient at animal
detection: only 219 LBP features applied in 18 stages achieve
final detection accuracy rate. The stages’ order is driven by
the highest detection rate.
the accuracy of detection and processing time.
With the two-stage architecture, the whole image is scanned
VIII. P ROPOSED A RCHITECTURE in the first stage to yield ROIs that possibly contain animals.
After a preprocessing step, which involves adapting the size
We want to emphasize that due to the large diversity of ani-
of ROIs to the requirements of the second stage, these resized
mal types and postures, compared to human faces or pedestrian
ROIs are then scanned by a second stage to verify whether
postures, it is hard to develop detectors for all large animals
or not they contain animals. The first stage of our proposed
at once. As a first attempt, we propose a two-stage archi-
scheme can be considered as a detectorİand the second stage
tecture in this paper that can detect some large animals, as
as a “classifier” or “recognizer.”
highlighted in Section IV. We begin this section with a qualita-
tive comparison between the aforementioned detectors, which
clarifies fundamental reasons and advantages of our proposed A. Architecture Design
two-stage architecture for detecting large animals. HOG-SVM We design our system with two main criteria in mind: accu-
and HOG-AdaBoost methods are less beneficial than LBP- racy of detection and processing time. This was performed in
AdaBoost and Haar-AdaBoost algorithms if they are applied order to decrease FPRs and to increase the accuracy of the
to the entire image (in the first stage), for the following rea- system. Moreover, in order to obtain a real-time detection sys-
sons. In Fig. 13, we show that HOG-AdaBoost and HOG-SVM tem, the processing time is used as a second design criterion.
have the highest FPRs compared to Haar-AdaBoost and This enables quick target detection. To achieve these criteria,
LBP-AdaBoost. The application of these two detectors might a two-stage system is suggested in Fig. 14.
have a severe impact on our system. Furthermore, as we are In the first stage, we apply a fast detection algorithm, which
dealing with real-time systems, HOG-SVM has the highest supplies the second stage with a set of ROIs that may contain
processing time compared to the other schemes, as shown in animals and other similar objects (false positive targets). To
Fig. 11. Therefore, only LBP-Adaboost and Haar-Adaboost fulfil the system requirements, the detector of the first stage
can be applied to the entire image (first stage) [6]. should operate simply and quickly, because it is applied to
Now, if we compare between LBP-AdaBoost and Haar- the entire input frame. We chose LBP-AdaBoost at the first
AdaBoost to determine which is best suited as a first stage, stage, since AdaBoost is more quick to reject false targets and
we select LBP-AdaBoost because of its low FPR and notice- less complex than SVM. Moreover, it is shown in Section VII
ably superior processing time, despite its lower true positive and Fig. 13 that LBP-AdaBoost has good performance results
rate. Moreover, we show in Table II, a quantitative compari- compared to other schemes. The first stage LBP-AdaBoost is
son between the three features. Again, we observe that the use applied to the entire image to obtain ROIs that may contain
of LBP allows for a few positive rates. The second stage of animals. Furthermore, this first stage uses a single classifier
our architecture is used to eliminate the false positive results trained by both animal-dataset categories (HTL and HTR).
extracted by the first stage. This can dramatically increase the Conversely, the second stage uses two parallel sub-classifiers.
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10 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS: SYSTEMS

Fig. 15. Example shows that an ROI detected by the first 1st classifier (red
rectangle) does not cover the minimum detectable rectangle size (green rect-
angle) of the 2nd stage classifiers; this is the case unless the ROI is extended
to the blue region.
Fig. 16. Experimental results of large animal detection performed on still
images in snowy, sunny, cloudy, and nighttime conditions.

Each sub-classifier uses HOG-SVM because of its excellent

performance in contour detection, and its strong ability to
eliminate false positive results obtained from the first stage.
Each sub-classifier of the second stage was used to recognize
a category of animals HTL or HTR (see Figs. 3 and 4). This
means that the two sub-classifiers are trained by the HTL and
HTR datasets separately. Moreover, HOG-SVM is used in the
second stage compared to Haar-SVM because the training time
of Haar-based methods is high compared to the method using
HOG, as shown in Table II. This is basically due to the num-
ber of features per window. For instance, in a window of size
28 × 20, the number of Haar features is greater than 200 000,
while there are only 560 HOG features. Nighttime detection
using Haar-AdaBoost also seems to be the poorest, as shown
in Section IX (Fig. 21). This is due to the fact that HOG excels
in contour detection over the Haar-based method. We empha-
size that we have adapted the parameters of HOG, developed Fig. 17. Experimental results performed on video showing a moose crossing
originally for pedestrians, in the context of animal detection. the roadway in evening conditions.
Specifically, the following parameters were selected after a set
of experiments: block size: 2 × 2 cells (16 × 16 pixels); stride
size: 8 × 8; cell size: 8 × 8 and 9 bins. Consequently, a substantial amount of time can be saved if we
According to our experiments, the second stage, resize the 280 × 200 region to a smaller one. Experimentally,
HOG-SVM, usually recognizes ROI rectangles larger the dimensions 70 × 50 were selected as a normalization size.
than those generated by the first stage, LBP-AdaBoost. Figs. 17 and 18 show some frames of large animal detection
The unfortunate result of this was that the ROIs (the red cut from three videos in different weather conditions.
ROIs shown in Fig. 15) obtained from the LBP-AdaBoost
stage were not large enough to be detected by the second
stage HOG-SVM (green rectangle in Fig. 15). To solve this B. Evaluation of the Two-Stage Scheme
problem, a preprocessing step was involved that consisted of We evaluated the performance of the two-stage system,
adapting the size of ROIs to the requirements of the second LBP-AdaBoost/HOG-SVM, following the same criteria used
stage. Many scale sizes were included, varying from 1.05 in Section VII, i.e., detection accuracy and processing time.
to 1.4 using hundreds of images. Their average mean value Hence, two sets of experiments were performed. In the first
(i.e., 1.2 which has the lowest standard deviation and covers set, we compared our LBP-AdaBoost/HOG-SVM system with
the minimum detectable rectangle size by HOG-SVM) was the well-known HOG-SVM and with the aforementioned
adopted; this was shown by the blue rectangle in Fig. 15. one-stage schemes (i.e., HOG-AdaBoost, LBP-AdaBoost, and
The resized ROIs can also be very large, which may result Haar-AdaBoost). After that, in the second set of experiments, a
in extra processing time in the second stage. For example, cascade of these detectors were compared to each other. More
if the ROI is a large moose with a size of 280 × 200 pixels precisely, the LBP-AdaBoost/HOG-SVM combination is com-
and the minimum detection window of the second stage is pared to HOG-SVM/LBP-AdaBoost. The results of processing
set to 56 × 40 for a larger detection range, important pro- time and detection accuracy are regrouped in Figs. 19 and 20,
cessing time will be wasted on the incomplete animal body. respectively.
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MAMMERI et al.: AVC MITIGATION SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATED VEHICLES
Fig. 18. Experimental results performed on video showing a horse crossing
the roadway in snowy conditions.
Fig. 19. Average detection speed; LBP-AdaBoost cascade HOG-SVM is
64.32 ms and HOG-SVM operating as a first stage cascade LBP-AdaBoost is
167.45 ms. Video size: 320×240; total frame number: 1026; initial (minimal)
detection window size: 56 × 40; scale rate: 1.05.
The average processing time of each classifier is expressed
in the bar chart of Fig. 19. The left bar represents our two-stage
system processing time; this is only 7.2 ms slower than the sin-
gle LBP-AdaBoost. As explained before, although HOG-SVM
consumes a great deal of time compared with other detectors
due to the preprocessing of ROIs, only an extra 7.2 ms is spent
on the second stage. However, exchanging the order of the
two stages leads to a completely different result. The cost for
the HOG-SVM/LBP-AdaBoost detector would be 167.45 ms,
which is slower than the single HOG-SVM detector.
On the other hand, we evaluated the performance accuracy
of our system, and drew the final DET curves. We plot-
ted the miss rate versus FPPI curves of all one-stage and
two-stage classifiers in Fig. 20, and drew the following con-
clusion. The two-stage detector LBP-AdaBoost/HOG-SVM
outperforms all single detectors, in addition to the two-stage
HOG-SVM/LBP-AdaBoost detector. Particularly in the event
that the false positive per image rate is around 1 × 10−4 ,
LBP-AdaBoost/HOG-SVM has a distinct advantage com-
pared with other detectors. When the FPPI increases to more
than 5 × 10−4 , the three detectors, LBP-AB/HOG-SVM,
11
Fig. 20. Miss rate versus FPPI curves used to demonstrate the two-stage
animal detection system.
Fig. 21. Miss rate versus FPPI curves used to demonstrate the two-stage
animal detection system (nighttime scenario).
HOG-SVM/LBP-AB, and LBP-AdaBoost, have almost sim-
ilar levels of accuracy. Moreover, Haar-AdaBoost detector
achieves a moderate level of performance but still does much
better than HOG-AdaBoost and HOG-SVM detectors.
IX. N IGHTTIME D ETECTION
It is shown in [27] that AVCs might occur anytime over a
24-h period. However, the most dangerous period for AVCs
seems to be from 6:00 P. M . to 8:00 A . M . The night period
is characterized by weak illumination and a limited field of
view, thus creating a different detection environment than that
of daytime detection. Usually, a thermographic (or infrared)
camera with a wavelength of 14 000 nm is applied to capture
objects at night. That is, an image is formed using the infrared
radiation released from warm-blooded animals [28].
The use of LADSet for the purpose of animal detection
at night is unrealistic. That is, a specific dataset for night-
time conditions is mandatory. We have created only a small
nighttime-dataset, since it is hard to find such videos/images
on the Internet. That is, only 654 thermographic positive
images (327 per subclassifier) and 6000 negative images were
collected.
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
12
Fig. 22. Nighttime experimental results performed on infrared still images.
Fig. 23. Experimental results performed on infrared videos of nighttime.
We then retrained the aforementioned one-stage and two-
stage architectures based on the thermographic animal images,
using the same strategy as performed with daytime detec-
tion. Of the four one-stage detectors, while LBP-AdaBoost
has the best performance in terms of animal detection in
daytime conditions (see Fig. 13), its classification ability at
nighttime seems to be the worst (with Haar-AdaBoost), as
shown in Fig. 21. More precisely, the Haar-AdaBoost detec-
tor performs slightly better than LBP-AdaBoost when the FPPI
rate is greater than 0.4×10−2 . This is because texture features
(LBP and Haar features) are weakened in nighttime environ-
ments. Conversely, the gradient features are strong enough
to be detected at night. That is, HOG-AdaBoost followed by
HOG-SVM have the best detection rate in nighttime conditions
(see Fig. 21).
These results are explained as follows. In the context of
animal detection technology, there are two main differences
between thermographic and common (visible light) images.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS: SYSTEMS
Some objects, such as tree branches or underbrush, and some
color backgrounds are automatically filtered out by the infrared
camera, which lowers the FPR. Furthermore, some textural
features of the animals are generalized or undermined; how-
ever, profile features are strengthened. However, we should
note that since our dataset contains only 654 thermographic
positive images, the nighttime detection result is not as good
as that of the daytime conditions. The final result would
be better if we used a large number of positive images.
In Figs. 22 and 23, nighttime animal detection of infrared
video is shown.
X. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we investigated the problem of AVC mitigation
using camera-based systems. Three detectors based on HOG,
LBP, and Haar features were used to detect large animals.
These features were trained separately on our dataset, LADSet,
using the well-known AdaBoost algorithm. That is, three dif-
ferent detectors called Haar-AdaBoost, HOG-AdaBoost, and
LBP-AdaBoost were constructed. These detectors were then
assessed and compared with each other. The comparison was
performed in terms of accuracy and processing time. After
that, these detectors were again compared to the well-known
HOG-SVM. Overall, LBP-AdaBoost has shown important
results compared to other schemes. However, a high FPR was
observed. To cope with this issue, we used LBP-AdaBoost and
took advantage of its good detection rate, and we combined
it with HOG-SVM. The latter has shown good performance
when detecting the contours of animals. That is, a new scheme
based on the two-stage strategy was developed. The afore-
mentioned schemes were evaluated and tested in different
illuminated conditions. To perform our experiments, we have
concentrated on the lateral view of a moose since this is the
position it takes when crossing roadways. Other positions,
such as posterior and anterior views and postures at vari-
ous angles, are left to future work. Our two-stage architecture
LBP-AdaBoost/ HOG-SVM has shown a good performance
in daytime conditions. However, we have observed that dur-
ing the nighttime, the combination of LBP-AdaBoost and
HOG-SVM has shown limited capabilities.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers
for their comments that help to improve the manuscript.
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13
Abdelhamid Mammeri received the M.Sc.
degree from the Catholic University of Louvain,
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 2002, and the Ph.D.
degree from Sherbrooke University, Sherbrooke,
QC, Canada, in 2010, all in electrical and computer
engineering.
He is a Research Associate with DIVA Strategic
Research Network, Ottawa University, Ottawa,
ON, Canada. His current research interests include
visual sensor networks, wireless ad hoc networks,
vehicular networks, energy minimization schemes
for visual sensor networks, object detection through vision applied on
Vehicular Adhoc Networks, etc. He has extensively published in highly
ranked international conferences and journals in the above areas.
Dr. Mammeri was a recipient of the FQRNT Quebec Scholarship Award
at Post-Doctorate-Level in 2012. He has served as a Technical Program
Committee Member for several conferences, including the IEEE Vehicular
Technology Conference 2013, the IEEE Local Computer Networks 2013, and
ACM Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems
2013.
Depu Zhou is currently pursuing the master’s
degree in electrical and computer engineering with
the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada.
His current research interests include video
streaming over vehicular networks.
Azzedine Boukerche received the M.Sc. and
Ph.D. degrees in computer science from McGill
University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
He is a Full Professor and the Canada Research
Chair Tier-1 with the University of Ottawa, Ottawa,
ON, Canada. He was a Faculty Member with the
University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA. He
is the Scientific Director of NSERC-DIVA Strategic
Research Network and the Director of PARADISE
Research Laboratory with Ottawa University. He
was a Senior Scientist with the Simulation Sciences
Division, Metron Corporation, San Diego, CA, USA. He was with the
JPL/NASA-California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, for one
year, where he contributed to a project centered about the specification and
verification of the software used to control interplanetary spacecraft operated
by JPL/NASA Laboratory. His current research interests include vehicular
networks, sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, mobile and pervasive
computing, wireless multimedia, performance evaluation and modeling
of large-scale distributed systems, distributed computing, and large-scale
distributed interactive simulation. He has published several research papers
in the above areas.
Dr. Boukerche was a recipient of the Ontario Distinguished
Researcher Award, the Premier of Ontario Research Excellence Award,
the G. S. Glinski Award for Excellence in Research, the IEEE Computer
Society Golden Core Award, the IEEE CS-Meritorious Award, the University
of Ottawa Award for Excellence in Research, and several best research
paper awards for his work on vehicular and sensor networking and mobile
computing. He is an Editor of three books on mobile computing, wireless
ad hoc, and sensor networks. He serves as an Associate Editor for several
IEEE T RANSACTIONS and ACM journals, as well as the Steering Committee
Chair for several IEEE and ACM international conferences. He is a Fellow of
the Engineering Institute of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Engineering,
and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.