Predicting pedestrian crossing intention is an indispensable aspect of deploying advanced driving systems (ADS) or advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) to real life. State-of-the-art methods in predicting pedestrian crossing intention often rely on multiple streams of information as inputs, each of which requires massive computational resources and heavy network architectures to generate. However, such reliance limits the practical application of the systems. In this paper, driven the the real-world demands of pedestrian crossing intention prediction models with both high efficiency and accuracy, we introduce a network with only frames of pedestrians as the input. Every component in the introduced network is driven by the goal of light weight. Specifically, we reduce the multi-source input dependency and employ light neural networks that are tailored for mobile devices. These smaller neural networks can fit into computer memory and can be transmitted over a computer network more easily, thus making them more suitable for real-life deployment and real-time prediction. To compensate the removal of the multi-source input, we enhance the network effectiveness by adopting a multi-task learning training, named "side task learning", to include multiple auxiliary tasks to jointly learn the feature extractor for improved robustness. Each head handles a specific task that potentially shares knowledge with other heads. In the meantime, the feature extractor is shared across all tasks to ensure the sharing of basic knowledge across all layers. The light weight but high efficiency characteristics of our model endow it the potential of being deployed on vehicle-based systems. Experiments validate that our model consistently delivers outstanding performances.
Accurate prediction of pedestrian crossing behaviors by autonomous vehicles can significantly improve traffic safety. Existing approaches often model pedestrian behaviors using trajectories or poses but do not offer a deeper semantic interpretation of a person's actions or how actions influence a pedestrian's intention to cross in the future. In this work, we follow the neuroscience and psychological literature to define pedestrian crossing behavior as a combination of an unobserved inner will (a probabilistic representation of binary intent of crossing vs. not crossing) and a set of multi-cla…
TrajFusionNet+: Transformer-Based Prediction of Pedestrian Crossing Intention via Fusion of Trajectory Representations and Scene Graphs
Perception, Robotics and Intelligent Machines Research Group (PRIME)（感知、机器人与智能机器研究组（PRIME））；Department of Computer Science, Université de Moncton（蒙克顿大学计算机科学系）
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Ford Motor Company（福特汽车公司）
In smart transportation, intelligent systems avoid potential collisions by predicting the intent of traffic agents, especially pedestrians. Pedestrian intent, defined as future action, e.g., start crossing, can be dependent on traffic surroundings. In this paper, we develop a framework to incorporate such dependency given observed pedestrian trajectory and scene frames. Our framework first encodes regional joint information between a pedestrian and surroundings over time into feature-map vectors. The global relation representations are then extracted from pairwise feature-map vectors to estima…
Predicting vulnerable road user behavior is an essential prerequisite for deploying Automated Driving Systems (ADS) in the real-world. Pedestrian crossing intention should be recognized in real-time, especially for urban driving. Recent works have shown the potential of using vision-based deep neural network models for this task. However, these models are not robust and certain issues still need to be resolved. First, the global spatio-temproal context that accounts for the interaction between the target pedestrian and the scene has not been properly utilized. Second, the optimum strategy for …
Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校德克萨斯高级计算中心）；Center of Transportation Research, The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校交通研究中心）；Austin Transportation Department, City of Austin（奥斯汀市奥斯汀交通局）
Pedestrian safety is a priority for transportation system managers and operators, and a main focus of the Vision Zero strategy employed by the City of Austin, Texas. While there are a number of treatments and technologies to effectively improve pedestrian safety, identifying the location where these treatments are most needed remains a challenge. Current practice requires manual observation of candidate locations for limited time periods, leading to an identification process that is time consuming, lags behind traffic pattern changes over time, and lacks scalability. Mid-block locations, where…
GTransPDM: A Graph-embedded Transformer with Positional Decoupling for Pedestrian Crossing Intention Prediction
Department of Traffic Information and Control Engineering, Jilin University（交通信息与控制工程系，吉林大学）；BIT-Barcelona Innovative Transportation Research Group, Civil Engineering School, UPC Barcelona Tech（巴塞罗那创新交通研究组，土木工程学院，UPC巴塞罗那技术学院）；Computer Vision Center (CVC), Computer Science Department, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)（计算机视觉中心（CVC），计算机科学系，巴塞罗那自治大学（UAB））
针对行人位置畸变及多模态时序建模难题，本文提出 GTransPDM，通过位置解耦与图嵌入 Transformer 融合姿态、位置和车辆运动特征，在 PIE 和 JAAD 上取得最优性能。
TrajFusionNet: Pedestrian Crossing Intention Prediction via Fusion of Sequential and Visual Trajectory Representations
Perception, Robotics and Intelligent Machines Research Group (PRIME) Department of Computer Science, Université de Moncton, Canada（感知、机器人与智能机器研究组（PRIME）计算机科学系，新不伦瑞克大学）
Unified Vision-Centric Pedestrian Crossing Action Prediction via Adaptive Patch Projection and Proactive Spatial Rectification
School of Electronics and Control Engineering, Chang’an University（长安大学电子与控制工程学院）；School of Astronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学航天学院）
Pedestrian crossing is one of the most typical behavior which conflicts with natural driving behavior of vehicles. Consequently, pedestrian crossing prediction is one of the primary task that influences the vehicle planning for safe driving. However, current methods that rely on the practically collected data in real driving scenes cannot depict and cover all kinds of scene condition in real traffic world. To this end, we formulate a deep virtual to real distillation framework by introducing the synthetic data that can be generated conveniently, and borrow the abundant information of pedestria…
The pedestrian crossing intention prediction problem is to estimate whether or not the target pedestrian will cross the street. State-of-the-art techniques heavily depend on visual data acquired through the front camera of the ego-vehicle to make a prediction of the pedestrian's crossing intention. Hence, the efficiency of current methodologies tends to decrease notably in situations where visual input is imprecise, for instance, when the distance between the pedestrian and ego-vehicle is considerable or the illumination levels are inadequate. To address the limitation, in this paper, we prese…
Universidad de Alcalá（阿尔卡拉大学）；Karlsruher Institut für Technologie（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Pedestrian crossing prediction is a crucial task for autonomous driving. Numerous studies show that an early estimation of the pedestrian's intention can decrease or even avoid a high percentage of accidents. In this paper, different variations of a deep learning system are proposed to attempt to solve this problem. The proposed models are composed of two parts: a CNN-based feature extractor and an RNN module. All the models were trained and tested on the JAAD dataset. The results obtained indicate that the choice of the features extraction method, the inclusion of additional variables such as…
Pedestrian crossing prediction has been a topic of active research, resulting in many new algorithmic solutions. While measuring the overall progress of those solutions over time tends to be more and more established due to the new publicly available benchmark and standardized evaluation procedures, knowing how well existing predictors react to unseen data remains an unanswered question. This evaluation is imperative as serviceable crossing behavior predictors should be set to work in various scenarii without compromising pedestrian safety due to misprediction. To this end, we conduct a study …
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center（丰田协作安全研究中心）
Humans, as both pedestrians and drivers, generally skillfully navigate traffic intersections. Despite the uncertainty, danger, and the non-verbal nature of communication commonly found in these interactions, there are surprisingly few collisions considering the total number of interactions. As the role of automation technology in vehicles grows, it becomes increasingly critical to understand the relationship between pedestrian and driver behavior: how pedestrians perceive the actions of a vehicle/driver and how pedestrians make crossing decisions. The relationship between time-to-arrival (TTA)…
In this paper, we present an end-to-end future-prediction model that focuses on pedestrian safety. Specifically, our model uses previous video frames, recorded from the perspective of the vehicle, to predict if a pedestrian will cross in front of the vehicle. The long term goal of this work is to design a fully autonomous system that acts and reacts as a defensive human driver would --- predicting future events and reacting to mitigate risk. We focus on pedestrian-vehicle interactions because of the high risk of harm to the pedestrian if their actions are miss-predicted. Our end-to-end model c…
Understanding the behaviors and intentions of pedestrians is still one of the main challenges for vehicle autonomy, as accurate predictions of their intentions can guarantee their safety and driving comfort of vehicles. In this paper, we address pedestrian crossing prediction in urban traffic environments by linking the dynamics of a pedestrian's skeleton to a binary crossing intention. We introduce TrouSPI-Net: a context-free, lightweight, multi-branch predictor. TrouSPI-Net extracts spatio-temporal features for different time resolutions by encoding pseudo-images sequences of skeletal joints…
In the absence of pedestrian crossing lights, finding a safe moment to cross the road is often hazardous and challenging, especially for people with visual impairments. We present a reliable low-cost solution, an Android device attached to a traffic sign or lighting pole near the crossing, indicating whether it is safe to cross the road. The indication can be by sound, display, vibration, and various communication modalities provided by the Android device. The integral system camera is aimed at approaching traffic. Optical flow is computed from the incoming video stream, and projected onto an …
Minimizing traffic accidents between vehicles and pedestrians is one of the primary research goals in intelligent transportation systems. To achieve the goal, pedestrian orientation recognition and prediction of pedestrian's crossing or not-crossing intention play a central role. Contemporary approaches do not guarantee satisfactory performance due to limited field-of-view, lack of generalization, and high computational complexity. To overcome these limitations, we propose a real-time predictive pedestrian collision warning service (P2CWS) for two tasks: pedestrian orientation recognition (100…
A low complexity contextual stacked ensemble-learning approach for pedestrian intent prediction
School of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London（伦敦女王学院电子工程与计算机科学学院）；Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学工程系）
A common yet potentially dangerous task is the act of crossing the street. Pedestrian accidents contribute a significant amount to the high number of annual traffic casualties, which is why it is crucial for pedestrians to use safety measures such as a crosswalk. However, people often forget to activate a crosswalk light or are unable to do so -- such as those who are visually impaired or have occupied hands. Other pedestrians are simply careless and find the crosswalk signals a hassle, which can result in an accident where a car hits them. In this paper, we consider an improvement to the cros…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）；Department of Computer Science, Stanford University（斯坦福大学计算机科学系）
Reasoning over visual data is a desirable capability for robotics and vision-based applications. Such reasoning enables forecasting of the next events or actions in videos. In recent years, various models have been developed based on convolution operations for prediction or forecasting, but they lack the ability to reason over spatiotemporal data and infer the relationships of different objects in the scene. In this paper, we present a framework based on graph convolution to uncover the spatiotemporal relationships in the scene for reasoning about pedestrian intent. A scene graph is built on t…
Inferring the full transportation network, including sidewalks and cycleways, is crucial for many automated systems, including autonomous driving, multi-modal navigation, trip planning, mobility simulations, and freight management. Many transportation decisions can be informed based on an accurate pedestrian network, its interactions, and connectivity with the road networks of other modes of travel. A connected pedestrian path network is vital to transportation activities, as sidewalks and crossings connect pedestrians to other modes of transportation. However, information about these paths' l…
In this work, we contribute an EM algorithm for estimation of corner points and linear crossing segments for both marked and unmarked pedestrian crosswalks using the detections of pedestrians from processed LiDAR point clouds or camera images. We demonstrate the algorithmic performance by analyzing three real-world datasets containing multiple periods of data collection for four-corner and two-corner intersections with marked and unmarked crosswalks. Additionally, we include a Python video tool to visualize the crossing parameter estimation, pedestrian trajectories, and phase intervals in our …
Currently, the visually impaired rely on either a sighted human, guide dog, or white cane to safely navigate. However, the training of guide dogs is extremely expensive, and canes cannot provide essential information regarding the color of traffic lights and direction of crosswalks. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based solution that provides information regarding the traffic light mode and the position of the zebra crossing. Previous solutions that utilize machine learning only provide one piece of information and are mostly binary: only detecting red or green lights. The proposed c…
Pedestrian behavior prediction is one of the major challenges for intelligent driving systems in urban environments. Pedestrians often exhibit a wide range of behaviors and adequate interpretations of those depend on various sources of information such as pedestrian appearance, states of other road users, the environment layout, etc. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-modal prediction algorithm that incorporates different sources of information captured from the environment to predict future crossing actions of pedestrians. The proposed model benefits from a hybrid learning arch…
The Crossing or Not-Crossing (C/NC) problem is important to autonomous vehicles (AVs) for safe vehicle/pedestrian interactions. However, this problem setup often ignores pedestrians walking along the direction of the vehicles' movement (LONG). To enhance the AVs' awareness of pedestrians behavior, we make the first step towards extending the C/NC to the C/NC/LONG problem and recognize them based on single body pose. In contrast, previous C/NC state classifiers depend on multiple poses or contextual information. Our proposed shallow neural network classifier aims to recognize these three states…
Understanding pedestrian crossing behavior is an essential goal in intelligent vehicle development, leading to an improvement in their security and traffic flow. In this paper, we developed a method called IntFormer. It is based on transformer architecture and a novel convolutional video classification model called RubiksNet. Following the evaluation procedure in a recent benchmark, we show that our model reaches state-of-the-art results with good performance ($\approx 40$ seq. per second) and size ($8\times $smaller than the best performing model), making it suitable for real-time usage. We a…
One of the most crucial yet challenging tasks for autonomous vehicles in urban environments is predicting the future behaviour of nearby pedestrians, especially at points of crossing. Predicting behaviour depends on many social and environmental factors, particularly interactions between road users. Capturing such interactions requires a global view of the scene and dynamics of the road users in three-dimensional space. This information, however, is missing from the current pedestrian behaviour benchmark datasets. Motivated by these challenges, we propose 1) a novel graph-based model for predi…
Temporal-contextual Event Learning for Pedestrian Crossing Intent Prediction
Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院重庆绿色智能技术研究院）；Chongqing School, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学重庆学院）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Predicting the behavior of road users, particularly pedestrians, is vital for safe motion planning in the context of autonomous driving systems. Traditionally, pedestrian behavior prediction has been realized in terms of forecasting future trajectories. However, recent evidence suggests that predicting higher-level actions, such as crossing the road, can help improve trajectory forecasting and planning tasks accordingly. There are a number of existing datasets that cater to the development of pedestrian action prediction algorithms, however, they lack certain characteristics, such as bird's ey…
Smooth handling of pedestrian interactions is a key requirement for Autonomous Vehicles (AV) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Such systems call for early and accurate prediction of a pedestrian's crossing/not-crossing behaviour in front of the vehicle. Existing approaches to pedestrian behaviour prediction make use of pedestrian motion, his/her location in a scene and static context variables such as traffic lights, zebra crossings etc. We stress on the necessity of early prediction for smooth operation of such systems. We introduce the influence of vehicle interactions on pedest…
One of the major challenges for autonomous vehicles in urban environments is to understand and predict other road users' actions, in particular, pedestrians at the point of crossing. The common approach to solving this problem is to use the motion history of the agents to predict their future trajectories. However, pedestrians exhibit highly variable actions most of which cannot be understood without visual observation of the pedestrians themselves and their surroundings. To this end, we propose a solution for the problem of pedestrian action anticipation at the point of crossing. Our approach…
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）
Our recent work suggests that, thanks to nowadays powerful CNNs, image-based 2D pose estimation is a promising cue for determining pedestrian intentions such as crossing the road in the path of the ego-vehicle, stopping before entering the road, and starting to walk or bending towards the road. This statement is based on the results obtained on non-naturalistic sequences (Daimler dataset), i.e. in sequences choreographed specifically for performing the study. Fortunately, a new publicly available dataset (JAAD) has appeared recently to allow developing methods for detecting pedestrian intentio…
Where Will They Go? Modelling Multimodal Pedestrian Manoeuvres from Ego-centric Videos
School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学计算机科学学院）；James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学詹姆斯·瓦特工程学院）；Department of Computer Science, Durham University（杜伦大学计算机科学系）
Pedestrians are particularly vulnerable road users in urban traffic. With the arrival of autonomous driving, novel technologies can be developed specifically to protect pedestrians. We propose a machine learning toolchain to train artificial neural networks as models of pedestrian behavior. In a preliminary study, we use synthetic data from simulations of a specific pedestrian crossing scenario to train a variational autoencoder and a long short-term memory network to predict a pedestrian's future visual perception. We can accurately predict a pedestrian's future perceptions within relevant ti…
Pedestrian Intention Prediction via Vision-Language Foundation Models
Institute for Transport Studies, Faculty of Environment, Computer Vision and Machine Learning Group, University of Leeds（运输研究学院、环境学院、计算机视觉与机器学习小组、莱斯特大学）；AI Centre, Department of Computer Science, University College London（人工智能中心、计算机科学系、伦敦大学学院）
DeepIPCv3: Event-Aware Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion for Sudden Pedestrian Crossing Avoidance
Department of Computer Science and Electronics, Universitas Gadjah Mada（计算机科学与电子系，加雅马达大学）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology（计算机科学与工程系，东福士大学）
Predicting pedestrian behavior is a crucial task for intelligent driving systems. Accurate predictions require a deep understanding of various contextual elements that potentially impact the way pedestrians behave. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework that relies on different data modalities to predict future trajectories and crossing actions of pedestrians from an ego-centric perspective. Specifically, our model utilizes a cross-modal Transformer architecture to capture dependencies between different data types. The output of the Transformer is augmented with representation…
Pedestrian's road crossing behaviour is one of the important aspects of urban dynamics that will be affected by the introduction of autonomous vehicles. In this study we introduce DeepSurvival, a novel framework for estimating pedestrian's waiting time at unsignalized mid-block crosswalks in mixed traffic conditions. We exploit the strengths of deep learning in capturing the nonlinearities in the data and develop a cox proportional hazard model with a deep neural network as the log-risk function. An embedded feature selection algorithm for reducing data dimensionality and enhancing the interpr…
VIT-Ped: Visionary Intention Transformer for Pedestrian Behavior Analysis
German University in Cairo（埃及德国大学）；Faculty of Media Engineering and Technology（媒体工程与技术学院）；Computer Science and Engineering Department（计算机科学与工程系）；C-DRiVeS Lab（C-DRiVeS实验室）；Cognitive Driving Research in Vehicular Systems（车载系统认知驾驶研究）
PIP-Net: Pedestrian Intention Prediction in the Wild
Institute for Transport Studies, Computer Vision and Machine Learning Group, University of Leeds（交通研究所、计算机视觉与机器学习组、利兹大学）；UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Department of Computer Science, University College London（伦敦大学学院人工智能中心、计算机科学系、伦敦大学学院）
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）
Anticipating the intentions of vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians and cyclists is critical for performing safe and comfortable driving maneuvers. This is the case for human driving and, thus, should be taken into account by systems providing any level of driving assistance, from advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) to fully autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this paper, we show how the latest advances on monocular vision-based human pose estimation, i.e. those relying on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), enable to recognize the intentions of such VRUs. In the case of cycl…
Institute for Transport Studies (ITS), University of Leeds（利兹大学交通研究所）；Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems, University of Lincoln（林肯大学林肯自主系统中心）；Institute of Engineering Sciences, De Montfort University（德蒙福特大学工程科学研究所）；School of Mechanical Engineering, Nat. Tech. University of Athens（雅典国家技术大学机械工程学院）；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；Ibex Automation Ltd（伊贝克斯自动化有限公司）
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must share space with pedestrians, both in carriageway cases such as cars at pedestrian crossings and off-carriageway cases such as delivery vehicles navigating through crowds on pedestrianized high-streets. Unlike static obstacles, pedestrians are active agents with complex, interactive motions. Planning AV actions in the presence of pedestrians thus requires modelling of their probable future behaviour as well as detecting and tracking them. This narrative review article is Part I of a pair, together surveying the current technology stack involved in this process, o…
With the rise of self-driving vehicles comes the risk of accidents and the need for higher safety, and protection for pedestrian detection in the following scenarios: imminent crashes, thus the car should crash into an object and avoid the pedestrian, and in the case of road intersections, where it is important for the car to stop when pedestrians are crossing. Currently, a special topology of deep neural networks called Fused Deep Neural Network (F-DNN) is considered to be the state of the art in pedestrian detection, as it has the lowest miss rate, yet it is very slow. Therefore, acceleratio…
