In recent years, the interests and needs of the Pedestrian Protection System (PPS), which is mounted on the vehicle for the purpose of traffic safety improvement is increasing. In this paper, we propose a pedestrian candidate window extraction and unit cell histogram based HOG descriptor calculation methods. At pedestrian detection candidate windows extraction stage, the bright ratio of pedestrian and its circumference region, vertical edge projection, edge factor, and PCA reconstruction image are used. Dalal's HOG requires pixel based histogram calculation by Gaussian weights and trilinear interpolation on overlapping blocks, But our method performs Gaussian down-weight and computes histogram on a per-cell basis, and then the histogram is combined with the adjacent cell, so our method can be calculated faster than Dalal's method. Our PCA reconstruction error based pedestrian detection candidate window extraction method efficiently classifies background based on the difference between pedestrian's head and shoulder area. The proposed method improves detection speed compared to the conventional HOG just using image without any prior information from camera calibration or depth map obtained from stereo cameras.