A machine learning approach to pedestrian detection for autonomous vehicles using High-Definition 3D Range Data

This article describes an automated sensor-based system to detect pedestrians in an autonomous vehicle application. Although the vehicle is equipped with a broad set of sensors, the article focuses on the processing of the information generated by a Velodyne HDL-64E LIDAR sensor. The cloud of points generated by the sensor (more than 1 million points per revolution) is processed to detect pedestrians, by selecting cubic shapes and applying machine vision and machine learning algorithms to the XY, XZ, and YZ projections of the points contained in the cube. The work relates an exhaustive analysis of the performance of three different machine learning algorithms: k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN), Naïve Bayes classifier (NBC), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). These algorithms have been trained with 1931 samples. The final performance of the method, measured a real traffic scenery, which contained 16 pedestrians and 469 samples of non-pedestrians, shows sensitivity (81.2%), accuracy (96.2%) and specificity (96.8%).This work was partially supported by ViSelTR (ref. TIN2012-39279) and cDrone (ref. TIN2013-45920-R) projects of the Spanish Government, and the “Research Programme for Groups of Scientific Excellence at Region of Murcia” of the Seneca Foundation (Agency for Science and Technology of the Region of Murcia—19895/GERM/15). 3D LIDAR has been funded by UPCA13-3E-1929 infrastructure projects of the Spanish Government. Diego Alonso wishes to thank the Spanish Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Subprograma Estatal de Movilidad, Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2013–2016 for grant CAS14/00238

Pedestrian Detection using Triple Laser Range Finders

Pedestrian detection is one of the important features in autonomous ground vehicle (AGV). It ensures the capability for safety navigation in urban environment. Therefore, the detection accuracy became a crucial part which leads to implementation using Laser Range Finder (LRF) for better data representation. In this study, an improved laser configuration and fusion technique is introduced by implementation of triple LRFs in two layers with Pedestrian Data Analysis (PDA) to recognize multiple pedestrians. The PDA integrates various features from feature extraction process for all clusters and fusion of multiple layers for better recognition. The experiments were conducted in various occlusion scenarios such as intersection, closed-pedestrian and combine scenarios. The analysis of the laser fusion and PDA for all scenarios showed an improvement of detection where the pedestrians were represented by various detection categories which solve occlusion issues when low numberof laser data were obtained

Autonomous personal vehicle for the first- and last-mile transportation services

This paper describes an autonomous vehicle testbed that aims at providing the first- and last- mile transportation services. The vehicle mainly operates in a crowded urban environment whose features can be extracted a priori. To ensure that the system is economically feasible, we take a minimalistic approach and exploit prior knowledge of the environment and the availability of the existing infrastructure such as cellular networks and traffic cameras. We present three main components of the system: pedestrian detection, localization (even in the presence of tall buildings) and navigation. The performance of each component is evaluated. Finally, we describe the role of the existing infrastructural sensors and show the improved performance of the system when they are utilized