The invention discloses a method and a system for detecting the pedestrian in front of a vehicle. The method comprises the steps of image acquisition and preprocessing, image scaling, LBP (Local Binary Pattern) and HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradient) feature extraction, region of interest extraction, target identification, and target fusion and early warning. A driver is reminded timely at the presence of the pedestrian in front of the vehicle. The system for detecting the pedestrian in front of the vehicle comprises three portions which are an image acquisition unit, an SOPC (System on Programmable Chip) unit and an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) unit, wherein the image acquisition unit is a camera unit, the SOPC unit comprises an image preprocessing unit, a region of interest extraction unit, a target identification unit, and a target fusion and early warning unit, and the ASIC unit comprises an image scaling unit, an LBP feature extraction unit and an HOG feature extraction unit. According to the invention, LBP features and HOG features are used in a joint manner, and two-level detection improves the accuracy of pedestrian detection on the whole; and HOG feature extraction is dynamically adjusted according to classification conditions of an LBP based SVM (Support Vector Machine), the calculation amount is reduced, the calculation speed is improved, and the driving safety of the vehicle is improved.