Event-based vision sensing and its application to pedestrian detection for intelligent transportation and surveillance
Han Wang, Juntao Wu, Jingyuan Bao, Min Liu, Yaoxiong Wang, Saiao Zhou, Yuman Nie, Yun Li（未知）
Han Wang, Juntao Wu, Jingyuan Bao, Min Liu, Yaoxiong Wang, Saiao Zhou, Yuman Nie, Yun Li
备注：
Published in Advanced Engineering Informatics, Vol. 76, Part B, 104989 (2026). Received 31 December 2025; Revised 3 June 2026; Accepted 18 June 2026; Available online 23 June 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.aei.2026.104989
Pedestrian detection in conventional frame-based imaging often suffers from limited temporal responsiveness and substantial data redundancy. Inspired by the biological retina, event-based vision sensing (EVS) offers ultra-low latency, high temporal resolution, wide dynamic range, and low power consumption, making it highly attractive for pedestrian perception in complex environments. This paper provides a comprehensive review of EVS and its application to pedestrian detection in intelligent transportation and surveillance scenarios. We first summarize the sensing principles, historical development, and key advantages of event-based vision in comparison with conventional frame-based imaging. We then review the major methodological components of event-based pedestrian detection, including sensing inputs, event representations, preprocessing strategies, feature extraction, detection models, datasets, and evaluation metrics. In addition, representative methods are comparatively analyzed in terms of temporal fidelity, detection accuracy, computational efficiency, and deployment complexity. Finally, we discuss the major open challenges in current EB-PD research, including benchmark standardization, event-native model design, multimodal fusion, and real-world deployment, and outline several promising directions for future development. This review aims to provide a structured and up-to-date reference for researchers working on event-based pedestrian perception and related intelligent vision systems.
This manuscript presents an efficient approach to map pedestrian surveillance footage to an aerial view for global assessment of features. The analysis of the footages relies on low level computer vision and enable real-time surveillance. While we neglect object tracking, we introduce cumulative grids on top view scene flow visualization to highlight situations of interest in the footage. Our approach is tested on multiview footage both from RGB cameras and, for the first time in the field, on RGB-D-sensors.
Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（江西财经大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
To obtain effective pedestrian detection results in surveillance video, there have been many methods proposed to handle the problems from severe occlusion, pose variation, clutter background, \emph{etc}. Besides detection accuracy, a robust surveillance video system should be stable to video quality degradation by network transmission, environment variation, etc. In this study, we conduct the research on the robustness of pedestrian detection algorithms to video quality degradation. The main contribution of this work includes the following three aspects. First, a large-scale Distorted Surveill…
EPAN: Robust Pedestrian Re-Identification via Enhanced Alignment Network for IoT Surveillance
China University of Petroleum (Beijing) Karamay Campus（中国石油大学（北京）克拉玛依校区）；China Tower Corporation Limited（中国铁塔股份有限公司）；Information Technology Research Institute of China Tower（中国铁塔信息技术研究院）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
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…
Multi-object tracking (MOT) has been dominated by the use of track by detection approaches due to the success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on detection in the last decade. As the datasets and bench-marking sites are published, research direction has shifted towards yielding best accuracy on generic scenarios including re-identification (reID) of objects while tracking. In this study, we narrow the scope of MOT for surveillance by providing a dedicated dataset of pedestrians and focus on in-depth analyses of well performing multi-object trackers to observe the weak and strong sides o…
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…
Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco（库斯科圣安东尼奥阿巴德国立大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú（秘鲁天主教大学）
The development of autonomous vehicles arises new challenges in urban traffic scenarios where vehicle-pedestrian interactions are frequent e.g. vehicle yields to pedestrians, pedestrian slows down due approaching to the vehicle. Over the last years, several datasets have been developed to model these interactions. However, available datasets do not cover near-accident scenarios that our dataset covers. We introduce I see you, a new vehicle-pedestrian interaction dataset that tackles the lack of trajectory data in near-accident scenarios using YOLOv5 and camera calibration methods. I see you co…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）
Road traffic accidents, especially vehicle pedestrian collisions in crosswalk, globally pose a severe threat to human lives and have become a leading cause of premature deaths. In order to protect such vulnerable road users from collisions, it is necessary to recognize possible conflict in advance and warn to road users, not post facto. A breakthrough for proactively preventing pedestrian collisions is to recognize pedestrian's potential risks based on vision sensors such as CCTVs. In this study, we propose a predictive collision risk area estimation system at unsignalized crosswalks. The prop…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；University of Maryland at College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
We present an algorithm for realtime anomaly detection in low to medium density crowd videos using trajectory-level behavior learning. Our formulation combines online tracking algorithms from computer vision, non-linear pedestrian motion models from crowd simulation, and Bayesian learning techniques to automatically compute the trajectory-level pedestrian behaviors for each agent in the video. These learned behaviors are used to segment the trajectories and motions of different pedestrians or agents and detect anomalies. We demonstrate the interactive performance on the PETS ARENA dataset as w…
Video anomaly detection is a core problem in vision. Correctly detecting and identifying anomalous behaviors in pedestrians from video data will enable safety-critical applications such as surveillance, activity monitoring, and human-robot interaction. In this paper, we propose to leverage trajectory localization and prediction for unsupervised pedestrian anomaly event detection. Different than previous reconstruction-based approaches, our proposed framework rely on the prediction errors of normal and abnormal pedestrian trajectories to detect anomalies spatially and temporally. We present exp…
Multispectral pedestrian detection is essential for around-the-clock applications, e.g., surveillance and autonomous driving. We deeply analyze Faster R-CNN for multispectral pedestrian detection task and then model it into a convolutional network (ConvNet) fusion problem. Further, we discover that ConvNet-based pedestrian detectors trained by color or thermal images separately provide complementary information in discriminating human instances. Thus there is a large potential to improve pedestrian detection by using color and thermal images in DNNs simultaneously. We carefully design four Con…
Pedestrian trajectory prediction for surveillance video is one of the important research topics in the field of computer vision and a key technology of intelligent surveillance systems. Social relationship among pedestrians is a key factor influencing pedestrian walking patterns but was mostly ignored in the literature. Pedestrians with different social relationships play different roles in the motion decision of target pedestrian. Motivated by this idea, we propose a Social Relationship Attention LSTM (SRA-LSTM) model to predict future trajectories. We design a social relationship encoder to …
Detection of pedestrians in aerial imagery captured by drones has many applications including intersection monitoring, patrolling, and surveillance, to name a few. However, the problem is involved due to continuouslychanging camera viewpoint and object appearance as well as the need for lightweight algorithms to run on on-board embedded systems. To address this issue, the paper proposes a framework for pedestrian detection in videos based on the YOLO object detection network [6] while having a high throughput of more than 5 FPS on the Jetson TX2 embedded board. The framework exploits deep lear…
We present BiPOCO, a Bi-directional trajectory predictor with POse COnstraints, for detecting anomalous activities of pedestrians in videos. In contrast to prior work based on feature reconstruction, our work identifies pedestrian anomalous events by forecasting their future trajectories and comparing the predictions with their expectations. We introduce a set of novel compositional pose-based losses with our predictor and leverage prediction errors of each body joint for pedestrian anomaly detection. Experimental results show that our BiPOCO approach can detect pedestrian anomalous activities…
University of Pisa（比萨大学）；National Research Council (ISTI-CNR)（国家研究委员会（信息科学与技术研究所））
Automatic people counting from images has recently drawn attention for urban monitoring in modern Smart Cities due to the ubiquity of surveillance camera networks. Current computer vision techniques rely on deep learning-based algorithms that estimate pedestrian densities in still, individual images. Only a bunch of works take advantage of temporal consistency in video sequences. In this work, we propose a spatio-temporal attentive neural network to estimate the number of pedestrians from surveillance videos. By taking advantage of the temporal correlation between consecutive frames, we lowere…
AdvSerial: Physical Adversarial Attacks on Infrastructure-mounted Pedestrian Detectors via Semantic Feature Suppression
School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学交通科学与工程学院）；State Key Lab of Intelligent Transportation System（智能交通系统国家重点实验室）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Twente（特文特大学）
Multispectral pedestrian detection has received extensive attention in recent years as a promising solution to facilitate robust human target detection for around-the-clock applications (e.g. security surveillance and autonomous driving). In this paper, we demonstrate illumination information encoded in multispectral images can be utilized to significantly boost performance of pedestrian detection. A novel illumination-aware weighting mechanism is present to accurately depict illumination condition of a scene. Such illumination information is incorporated into two-stream deep convolutional neu…
Northeast Electric Power University（东北电力大学）；College of Humanities Information Changchun University of Technology（长春工业大学人文信息学院）
Pedestrian detection is a research hotspot and a difficult issue in the computer vision such as the Intelligent Surveillance System, the Intelligent Transport System, robotics, and automotive safety. However, the human body's position, angle, and dress in a video scene are complicated and changeable, which have a great influence on the detection accuracy. In this paper, through the analysis on the pros and cons of Census Transform Histogram (CENTRIST), a novel feature is presented for human detection Ternary CENTRIST (T-CENTRIST). The T-CENTRIST feature takes the relationship between each pixe…
KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence（KIOS卓越研究与创新中心）；University of Cyprus（塞浦路斯大学）
Deep Learning-based object detectors can enhance the capabilities of smart camera systems in a wide spectrum of machine vision applications including video surveillance, autonomous driving, robots and drones, smart factory, and health monitoring. Pedestrian detection plays a key role in all these applications and deep learning can be used to construct accurate state-of-the-art detectors. However, such complex paradigms do not scale easily and are not traditionally implemented in resource-constrained smart cameras for on-device processing which offers significant advantages in situations when r…
Instituto de Telecomunicações（电信研究所）；University of Beira Interior（贝拉内格罗大学）；India Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；JSS Science and Technology University（JSS科技大学）
Over the last decades, the world has been witnessing growing threats to the security in urban spaces, which has augmented the relevance given to visual surveillance solutions able to detect, track and identify persons of interest in crowds. In particular, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a potential tool for this kind of analysis, as they provide a cheap way for data collection, cover large and difficult-to-reach areas, while reducing human staff demands. In this context, all the available datasets are exclusively suitable for the pedestrian re-identification problem, in which the multi-cam…
Multispectral pedestrian detection has attracted increasing attention from the research community due to its crucial competence for many around-the-clock applications (e.g., video surveillance and autonomous driving), especially under insufficient illumination conditions. We create a human baseline over the KAIST dataset and reveal that there is still a large gap between current top detectors and human performance. To narrow this gap, we propose a network fusion architecture, which consists of a multispectral proposal network to generate pedestrian proposals, and a subsequent multispectral cla…
Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院电子学研究所）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Pedestrian detection in crowded scenes is a challenging problem, because occlusion happens frequently among different pedestrians. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient detection network to hunt pedestrians in crowd scenes. The proposed method, namely PedHunter, introduces strong occlusion handling ability to existing region-based detection networks without bringing extra computations in the inference stage. Specifically, we design a mask-guided module to leverage the head information to enhance the feature representation learning of the backbone network. Moreover, we develop a …
Center for Informatics Science, Nile University（尼罗大学信息学中心）
Detection of pedestrians on embedded devices, such as those on-board of robots and drones, has many applications including road intersection monitoring, security, crowd monitoring and surveillance, to name a few. However, the problem can be challenging due to continuously-changing camera viewpoint and varying object appearances as well as the need for lightweight algorithms suitable for embedded systems. This paper proposes a robust framework for pedestrian detection in many footages. The framework performs fine and coarse detections on different image regions and exploits temporal and spatial…
Studies of object detection and localization, particularly pedestrian detection have received considerable attention in recent times due to its several prospective applications such as surveillance, driving assistance, autonomous cars, etc. Also, a significant trend of latest research studies in related problem areas is the use of sophisticated Deep Learning based approaches to improve the benchmark performance on various standard datasets. A trade-off between the speed (number of video frames processed per second) and detection accuracy has often been reported in the existing literature. In t…
Pedestrian detection is an important component for safety of autonomous vehicles, as well as for traffic and street surveillance. There are extensive benchmarks on this topic and it has been shown to be a challenging problem when applied on real use-case scenarios. In purely image-based pedestrian detection approaches, the state-of-the-art results have been achieved with convolutional neural networks (CNN) and surprisingly few detection frameworks have been built upon multi-cue approaches. In this work, we develop a new pedestrian detector for autonomous vehicles that exploits LiDAR data, in a…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Twente（特温特大学）
Effective fusion of complementary information captured by multi-modal sensors (visible and infrared cameras) enables robust pedestrian detection under various surveillance situations (e.g. daytime and nighttime). In this paper, we present a novel box-level segmentation supervised learning framework for accurate and real-time multispectral pedestrian detection by incorporating features extracted in visible and infrared channels. Specifically, our method takes pairs of aligned visible and infrared images with easily obtained bounding box annotations as input and estimates accurate prediction map…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Twente（特文特大学）
Multimodal information (e.g., visible and thermal) can generate robust pedestrian detections to facilitate around-the-clock computer vision applications, such as autonomous driving and video surveillance. However, it still remains a crucial challenge to train a reliable detector working well in different multispectral pedestrian datasets without manual annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework for multispectral pedestrian detection, by iteratively generating pseudo annotations and updating the parameters of our designed multispectral pedestrian det…
In this paper, we present a real-time robust multi-view pedestrian detection and tracking system for video surveillance using neural networks which can be used in dynamic environments. The proposed system consists of two phases: multi-view pedestrian detection and tracking. First, pedestrian detection utilizes background subtraction to segment the foreground blob. An adaptive background subtraction method where each of the pixel of input image models as a mixture of Gaussians and uses an on-line approximation to update the model applies to extract the foreground region. The Gaussian distributi…
Pedestrian detection is a popular research topic due to its paramount importance for a number of applications, especially in the fields of automotive, surveillance and robotics. Despite the significant improvements, pedestrian detection is still an open challenge that calls for more and more accurate algorithms. In the last few years, deep learning and in particular convolutional neural networks emerged as the state of the art in terms of accuracy for a number of computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection and segmentation, often outperforming the previous gold standar…
Kingston University（金斯顿大学）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；University of Western Macedonia（西马其顿大学）
Smart video sensors for applications related to surveillance and security are IOT-based as they use Internet for various purposes. Such applications include crowd behaviour monitoring and advanced decision support systems operating and transmitting information over internet. The analysis of crowd and pedestrian behaviour is an important task for smart IoT cameras and in particular video processing. In order to provide related behavioural models, simulation and tracking approaches have been considered in the literature. In both cases ground truth is essential to train deep models and provide a …
Group 42（G42集团）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；National Center for Artificial Intelligence（国家人工智能中心）
Pedestrian detection is the cornerstone of many vision based applications, starting from object tracking to video surveillance and more recently, autonomous driving. With the rapid development of deep learning in object detection, pedestrian detection has achieved very good performance in traditional single-dataset training and evaluation setting. However, in this study on generalizable pedestrian detectors, we show that, current pedestrian detectors poorly handle even small domain shifts in cross-dataset evaluation. We attribute the limited generalization to two main factors, the method and t…
Institute of Anthropomatics & Robotics（人机交互与机器人研究所）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Hensoldt Optronics GmbH（亨索尔特光电有限公司）；Autonomous Systems（自主系统（研究所））；Daimler TSS（戴姆勒TSS公司）
Multispectral images consisting of aligned visual-optical (VIS) and thermal infrared (IR) image pairs are well-suited for practical applications like autonomous driving or visual surveillance. Such data can be used to increase the performance of pedestrian detection especially for weakly illuminated, small-scaled, or partially occluded instances. The current state-of-the-art is based on variants of Faster R-CNN and thus passes through two stages: a proposal generator network with handcrafted anchor boxes for object localization and a classification network for verifying the object category. In…
Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI)（人工智能研究院（IIAI））；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）
Pedestrian detection is used in many vision based applications ranging from video surveillance to autonomous driving. Despite achieving high performance, it is still largely unknown how well existing detectors generalize to unseen data. This is important because a practical detector should be ready to use in various scenarios in applications. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive study in this paper, using a general principle of direct cross-dataset evaluation. Through this study, we find that existing state-of-the-art pedestrian detectors, though perform quite well when trained and tested o…
DADFNet: Dual Attention and Dual Frequency-Guided Dehazing Network for Video-Empowered Intelligent Transportation
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Sony AI（索尼人工智能研究院）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）
University of São Paulo（圣保罗大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Carmera Inc.（卡默拉公司）
An understanding of pedestrian dynamics is indispensable for numerous urban applications including the design of transportation networks and planing for business development. Pedestrian counting often requires utilizing manual or technical means to count individuals in each location of interest. However, such methods do not scale to the size of a city and a new approach to fill this gap is here proposed. In this project, we used a large dense dataset of images of New York City along with computer vision techniques to construct a spatio-temporal map of relative person density. Due to the limita…
State Key lab. of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学工业控制技术国家重点实验室）；Alibaba-ZJU Joint Research Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）；School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学信息科学与工程学院）；Academy for Engineering and Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学工程与应用技术研究院）
Vision-based dynamic pedestrian intrusion detection (PID), judging whether pedestrians intrude an area-of-interest (AoI) by a moving camera, is an important task in mobile surveillance. The dynamically changing AoIs and a number of pedestrians in video frames increase the difficulty and computational complexity of determining whether pedestrians intrude the AoI, which makes previous algorithms incapable of this task. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient multi-task deep neural network, PIDNet, to solve this problem. PIDNet is mainly designed by considering two factors: accurately seg…
University of Cincinnati（辛辛那提大学）；Central Michigan University（中央密歇根大学）；University of Louisiana at Lafayette（路易斯安那大学拉斐特分校）
Action detection and public traffic safety are crucial aspects of a safe community and a better society. Monitoring traffic flows in a smart city using different surveillance cameras can play a significant role in recognizing accidents and alerting first responders. The utilization of action recognition (AR) in computer vision tasks has contributed towards high-precision applications in video surveillance, medical imaging, and digital signal processing. This paper presents an intensive review focusing on action recognition in accident detection and autonomous transportation systems for a smart…
Vi-SAFE: A Spatial-Temporal Framework for Efficient Violence Detection in Public Surveillance
School of Information Network Security, People's Public Security University of China（中国人民公安大学信息安全学院）；Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学建筑与土木工程系）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）；Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto（多伦多大学应用科学与工程学院）
Accurate and efficient pedestrian detection is crucial for the intelligent transportation system regarding pedestrian safety and mobility, e.g., Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, and smart pedestrian crosswalk systems. Among all pedestrian detection methods, vision-based detection method is demonstrated to be the most effective in previous studies. However, the existing vision-based pedestrian detection algorithms still have two limitations that restrict their implementations, those being real-time performance as well as the resistance to the impacts of environmental factors, e.g., low illum…
DensePed-Lite: Quality-Aware Adaptive Detection for Dense Pedestrians under Occlusion
Jilin University（吉林大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Taiyuan University of Technology（太原理工大学）；Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education（符号计算与知识工程教育部重点实验室）
College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学电子与信息工程学院）；Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing（广东省智能信息处理重点实验室）；Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau（澳门大学计算机与信息科学系）；State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City（物联网与智慧城市国家重点实验室）
Predicting human motion behavior in a crowd is important for many applications, ranging from the natural navigation of autonomous vehicles to intelligent security systems of video surveillance. All the previous works model and predict the trajectory with a single resolution, which is rather inefficient and difficult to simultaneously exploit the long-range information (e.g., the destination of the trajectory), and the short-range information (e.g., the walking direction and speed at a certain time) of the motion behavior. In this paper, we propose a temporal pyramid network for pedestrian traj…
University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Recent advancements in energy-efficient hardware technology is driving the exponential growth we are experiencing in the Internet of Things (IoT) space, with more pervasive computations being performed near to data generation sources. A range of intelligent devices and applications performing local detection is emerging (activity recognition, fitness monitoring, etc.) bringing with them obvious advantages such as reducing detection latency for improved interaction with devices and safeguarding user data by not leaving the device. Video processing holds utility for many emerging applications an…
PedDet: Adaptive Spectral Optimization for Multimodal Pedestrian Detection
The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；La Trobe University（拉筹伯大学）；Central South University（中南大学）；NavInfo Co., Ltd.（四维图新股份有限公司）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network-Inspired Vessel Identification and Tracking for UAV-Based Maritime Surveillance
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；University of Aberdeen（阿伯丁大学）；Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Vision Transformer for Robust Occluded Person Reidentification in Complex Surveillance Scenes
China Tower Corporation Limited（中国铁塔股份有限公司）；China University of Petroleum-Beijing at Karamay（中国石油大学（北京）克拉玛依校区）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
