This paper presents a novel context-based approach for pedestrian motion prediction in crowded, urban intersections, with the additional flexibility of prediction in similar, but new, environments. Previously, Chen et. al. combined Markovian-based and clustering-based approaches to learn motion primitives in a grid-based world and subsequently predict pedestrian trajectories by modeling the transition between learned primitives as a Gaussian Process (GP). This work extends that prior approach by incorporating semantic features from the environment (relative distance to curbside and status of pedestrian traffic lights) in the GP formulation for more accurate predictions of pedestrian trajectories over the same timescale. We evaluate the new approach on real-world data collected using one of the vehicles in the MIT Mobility On Demand fleet. The results show 12.5% improvement in prediction accuracy and a 2.65 times reduction in Area Under the Curve (AUC), which is used as a metric to quantify the span of predicted set of trajectories, such that a lower AUC corresponds to a higher level of confidence in the future direction of pedestrian motion.
Urban planners and policy makers face the challenge of creating livable and enjoyable cities for larger populations in much denser urban conditions. While the urban microclimate holds a key role in defining the quality of urban spaces today and in the future, the integration of wind microclimate assessment in early urban design and planning processes remains a challenge due to the complexity and high computational expense of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. This work develops a data-driven workflow for real-time pedestrian wind comfort estimation in complex urban environments wh…
Social-IWSTCNN: A Social Interaction-Weighted Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Neural Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction in Urban Traffic Scenarios
University of Gothenburg（哥德堡大学）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）
This paper presents a novel incremental learning algorithm for pedestrian motion prediction, with the ability to improve the learned model over time when data is incrementally available. In this setup, trajectories are modeled as simple segments called motion primitives. Transitions between motion primitives are modeled as Gaussian Processes. When new data is available, the motion primitives learned from the new data are compared with the previous ones by measuring the inner product of the motion primitive vectors. Similar motion primitives and transitions are fused and novel motion primitives…
Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）；University of Stavanger（斯塔万格大学）；Elsevier B.V.（爱思唯尔出版集团）；STM Document Engineering Pvt Ltd.（STM文档工程私人有限公司）
Approximating wind flows using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods can be time-consuming. Creating a tool for interactively designing prototypes while observing the wind flow change requires simpler models to simulate faster. Instead of running numerical approximations resulting in detailed calculations, data-driven methods and deep learning might be able to give similar results in a fraction of the time. This work rephrases the problem from computing 3D flow fields using CFD to a 2D image-to-image translation-based problem on the building footprints to predict the flow field at pedestr…
Trajectory-based real-time pedestrian crash prediction at intersections: A novel non-linear link function for block maxima led Bayesian GEV framework addressing heterogeneous traffic condition
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Toyota Motor Europe（丰田汽车欧洲公司）；CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security（CISPA亥姆霍兹信息安全中心）
Accurate prediction of pedestrian and bicyclist paths is integral to the development of reliable autonomous vehicles in dense urban environments. The interactions between vehicle and pedestrian or bicyclist have a significant impact on the trajectories of traffic participants e.g. stopping or turning to avoid collisions. Although recent datasets and trajectory prediction approaches have fostered the development of autonomous vehicles yet the amount of vehicle-pedestrian (bicyclist) interactions modeled are sparse. In this work, we propose Euro-PVI, a dataset of pedestrian and bicyclist traject…
This paper presents a novel framework for accurate pedestrian intent prediction at intersections. Given some prior knowledge of the curbside geometry, the presented framework can accurately predict pedestrian trajectories, even in new intersections that it has not been trained on. This is achieved by making use of the contravariant components of trajectories in the curbside coordinate system, which ensures that the transformation of trajectories across intersections is affine, regardless of the curbside geometry. Our method is based on the Augmented Semi Nonnegative Sparse Coding (ASNSC) formu…
Autonomous Vehicles navigating in urban areas have a need to understand and predict future pedestrian behavior for safer navigation. This high level of situational awareness requires observing pedestrian behavior and extrapolating their positions to know future positions. While some work has been done in this field using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), one of the few observed drawbacks of the method is the need for informed priors for learning behavior. In this work, an extension to the Growing Hidden Markov Model (GHMM) method is proposed to solve some of these drawbacks. This is achieved by bui…
One desirable capability of autonomous cars is to accurately predict the pedestrian motion near intersections for safe and efficient trajectory planning. We are interested in developing transfer learning algorithms that can be trained on the pedestrian trajectories collected at one intersection and yet still provide accurate predictions of the trajectories at another, previously unseen intersection. We first discussed the feature selection for transferable pedestrian motion models in general. Following this discussion, we developed one transferable pedestrian motion prediction algorithm based …
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Forecasting pedestrians' future motions is essential for autonomous driving systems to safely navigate in urban areas. However, existing prediction algorithms often overly rely on past observed trajectories and tend to fail around abrupt dynamic changes, such as when pedestrians suddenly start or stop walking. We suggest that predicting these highly non-linear transitions should form a core component to improve the robustness of motion prediction algorithms. In this paper, we introduce the new task of pedestrian stop and go forecasting. Considering the lack of suitable existing datasets for it…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
The mortality rate for pedestrians using wheelchairs was 36% higher than the overall population pedestrian mortality rate. However, there is no data to clarify the pedestrians' categories in both fatal and nonfatal accidents, since police reports often do not keep a record of whether a victim was using a wheelchair or has a disability. Currently, real-time detection of vulnerable road users using advanced traffic sensors installed at the infrastructure side has a great potential to significantly improve traffic safety at the intersection. In this research, we develop a systematic framework wit…
Prior research has extensively explored Autonomous Vehicle (AV) navigation in the presence of other vehicles, however, navigation among pedestrians, who are the most vulnerable element in urban environments, has been less examined. This paper explores AV navigation in crowded, unsignalized intersections. We compare the performance of different deep reinforcement learning methods trained on our reward function and state representation. The performance of these methods and a standard rule-based approach were evaluated in two ways, first at the unsignalized intersection on which the methods were …
Multi-Pedestrian Safety Warning at Urban Intersections Use Case of Digital Twin
Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学土木工程与工程力学系）；Data Science Institute（数据科学研究院）；Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学电气工程系）
We propose a safe DRL approach for autonomous vehicle (AV) navigation through crowds of pedestrians while making a left turn at an unsignalized intersection. Our method uses two long-short term memory (LSTM) models that are trained to generate the perceived state of the environment and the future trajectories of pedestrians given noisy observations of their movement. A future collision prediction algorithm based on the future trajectories of the ego vehicle and pedestrians is used to mask unsafe actions if the system predicts a collision. The performance of our approach is evaluated in two exp…
A Real-time Evaluation Framework for Pedestrian's Potential Risk at Non-Signalized Intersections Based on Predicted Post-Encroachment Time
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；Univ. Guatave Eiffel（古斯塔夫·埃菲尔大学）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）
Before the transition of AVs to urban roads and subsequently unprecedented changes in traffic conditions, evaluation of transportation policies and futuristic road design related to pedestrian crossing behavior is of vital importance. Recent studies analyzed the non-causal impact of various variables on pedestrian waiting time in the presence of AVs. However, we mainly investigate the causal effect of traffic density on pedestrian waiting time. We develop a Double/Debiased Machine Learning (DML) model in which the impact of confounders variable influencing both a policy and an outcome of inter…
DeCoR: Design and Control Co-Optimization for Urban Streets Using Reinforcement Learning
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA（田纳西大学，诺克斯维尔分校）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；University of California, Riverside, CA, USA（加州大学河滨分校）
Joint Pedestrian and Vehicle Traffic Optimization in Urban Environments using Reinforcement Learning
Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA（田纳西大学电气工程与计算机科学系Min H. Kao部门）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at George Mason University（乔治·马歇尔大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校工业与系统工程系）；Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA（田纳西大学土木与环境工程系）
In applications such as autonomous driving, it is important to understand, infer, and anticipate the intention and future behavior of pedestrians. This ability allows vehicles to avoid collisions and improve ride safety and quality. This paper proposes a biomechanically inspired recurrent neural network (Bio-LSTM) that can predict the location and 3D articulated body pose of pedestrians in a global coordinate frame, given 3D poses and locations estimated in prior frames with inaccuracy. The proposed network is able to predict poses and global locations for multiple pedestrians simultaneously, …
PEDESTRIAN: An Egocentric Vision Dataset for Obstacle Detection on Pavements
CYENS Centre of Excellence（CYENS卓越中心）；Open University Cyprus（塞浦路斯开放大学）；Department of Communication and Internet Studies（通信与互联网研究系）；Cyprus University of Technology（塞浦路斯技术大学）；AI Cyprus Ethical Novelties Ltd（塞浦路斯AI伦理创新有限公司）；Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts（多媒体与图形艺术系）
To ensure pedestrian friendly streets in the era of automated vehicles, reassessment of current policies, practices, design, rules and regulations of urban areas is of importance. This study investigates pedestrian crossing behaviour, as an important element of urban dynamics that is expected to be affected by the presence of automated vehicles. For this purpose, an interpretable machine learning framework is proposed to explore factors affecting pedestrians' wait time before crossing mid-block crosswalks in the presence of automated vehicles. To collect rich behavioural data, we developed a d…
University of Warwick（华威大学）；Vivacity Labs（维瓦西蒂实验室）
Reinforcement Learning is proving a successful tool that can manage urban intersections with a fraction of the effort required to curate traditional traffic controllers. However, literature on the introduction and control of pedestrians to such intersections is scarce. Furthermore, it is unclear what traffic state variables should be used as reward to obtain the best agent performance. This paper robustly evaluates 30 different Reinforcement Learning reward functions for controlling intersections serving pedestrians and vehicles covering the main traffic state variables available via modern vi…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Institute of High Performance Computing（高性能计算研究所）；Center for Frontier AI Research（前沿人工智能研究中心）
Data-driven approaches, including deep learning, have shown great promise as surrogate models across many domains. These extend to various areas in sustainability. An interesting direction for which data-driven methods have not been applied much yet is in the quick quantitative evaluation of urban layouts for planning and design. In particular, urban designs typically involve complex trade-offs between multiple objectives, including limits on urban build-up and/or consideration of urban heat island effect. Hence, it can be beneficial to urban planners to have a fast surrogate model to predict …
Identifying built environment factors influencing driver yielding behavior at unsignalized intersections: A naturalistic open-source dataset collected in Minnesota
Saint Louis University（圣路易斯大学）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉工程技术大学）
The potential market for modern self-driving cars is enormous, as they are developing remarkably rapidly. At the same time, however, accidents of pedestrian fatalities caused by autonomous driving have been recorded in the case of street crossing. To ensure traffic safety in self-driving environments and respond to vehicle-human interaction challenges such as jaywalking, we propose Level-$k$ Meta Reinforcement Learning (LK-MRL) algorithm. It takes into account the cognitive hierarchy of pedestrian responses and enables self-driving vehicles to adapt to various human behaviors. %which takes int…
