In this paper, we propose an approach for fast pedestrian detection in images. Inspired by the histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features, a set of multi-scale orientation (MSO) features are proposed as the feature representation. The features are extracted on square image blocks of various sizes (called units), containing coarse and fine features in which coarse ones are the unit orientations and fine ones are the pixel orientation histograms of the unit. A cascade of Adaboost is employed to train classifiers on the coarse features, aiming to high detection speed. A greedy searching algorithm is employed to select fine features, which are input into SVMs to train the fine classifiers, aiming to high detection accuracy. Experiments report that our approach obtains state-of-art results with 12.4 times faster than the SVM+HOG method.