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

CBPRS: A City Based Parking and Routing System

Navigational systems assist drivers in finding a route between two locations that is time optimal in theory but seldom in practice due to delaying circumstances the system is unaware of, such as traffic jams. Upon arrival at the destination the service of the system ends and the driver is forced to locate a parking place without further assistance. We propose a City Based Parking Routing System (CBPRS) that monitors and reserves parking places for CBPRS participants within a city. The CBPRS guides vehicles using an ant based distributed hierarchical routing algorithm to their reserved parking place. Through means of experiments in a simulation environment we found that reductions of travel times for participants were significant in comparison to a situation where vehicles relied on static routing information generated by the well known Dijkstra’s algorithm. Furthermore, we found that the CBPRS was able to increase city wide traffic flows and decrease the number and duration of traffic jams throughout the city once the number of participants increased.information systems;computer simulation;dynamic routing

A review of traffic simulation software

Computer simulation of tra c is a widely used method in research of tra c modelling, planning and development of tra c networks and systems. Vehicular tra c systems are of growing concern and interest globally and modelling arbitrarily complex tra c systems is a hard problem. In this article we review some of the tra c simulation software applications, their features and characteristics as well as the issues these applications face. Additionally, we introduce some algorithmic ideas, underpinning data structural approaches and quanti able metrics that can be applied to simulated model systems

Modeling of traffic data characteristics by Dirichlet Process Mixtures

Conference Theme: Green Automation Toward a Sustainable SocietyThis paper presents a statistical method for modeling large volume of traffic data by Dirichlet Process Mixtures (DPM). Traffic signals are in general defined by their spatial-temporal characteristics, of which some can be common or similar across a set of signals, while a minority of these signals may have characteristics inconsistent with the majority. These are termed outliers. Outlier detection aims to segment and eliminate them in order to improve signal quality. It is accepted that the problem of outlier detection is non-trivial. As traffic signals generally share a high degree of spatial-temporal similarities within the signal and between different types of traffic signals, traditional modeling approaches are ineffective in distinguishing these similarities and discerning their differences. In regard to modeling the traffic data characteristics by DPM, this paper conveys three contributions. First, a new generic statistical model for traffic data is proposed based on DPM. Second, this model achieves an outlier detection rate of 96.74% based on a database of 764,027 vehicles. Third, the proposed model is scalable to the entire road network. © 2012 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

SYSTEM MODEL FOR AUTONOMOUS ROAD FREIGHT TRANSPORTATION

Emerging info-communication and vehicle technologies (especially vehicle automation) facilitate evolvement of autonomous road freight transportation. The entire transport system and its operation undergo a major change. New service concepts are growing and the existing ones are being transformed. The changing is particularly significant in city logistics. However, there are debates about the ways of automation of processes targeting improvement of capacity utilisation and decrease of expenditures. The main research questions of the paper are therefore: what properties of the future autonomous freight transportation are presumed; what system structure is to be constructed and how the system is to be operated? After introducing the basic notions and reviews of the current systems and developments, the shifting from traditional freight transportation to autonomous system is investigated by several aspects. A system- and process-oriented analytical modelling method has been applied. The main system constituents and their connections are modelled. Finally, we elaborate the operational model of road freight transportation, which is applicable principally in metropolitan areas. In conclusion, the presented results appoint the research and innovation trends towards the automation of freight transportation

Visual computing techniques for automated LIDAR annotation with application to intelligent transport systems

106 p.The concept of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) refers to the application of communication and information technologies to transport with the aim of making it more efficient, sustainable, and safer. Computer vision is increasingly being used for ITS applications, such as infrastructure management or advanced driver-assistance systems. The latest progress in computer vision, thanks to the Deep Learning techniques, and the race for autonomous vehicle, have created a growing requirement for annotated data in the automotive industry. The data to be annotated is composed by images captured by the cameras of the vehicles and LIDAR data in the form of point clouds. LIDAR sensors are used for tasks such as object detection and localization. The capacity of LIDAR sensors to identify objects at long distances and to provide estimations of their distance make them very appealing sensors for autonomous driving.This thesis presents a method to automate the annotation of lane markings with LIDAR data. The state of the art of lane markings detection based on LIDAR data is reviewed and a novel method is presented. The precision of the method is evaluated against manually annotated data. Its usefulness is also evaluated, measuring the reduction of the required time to annotate new data thanks to the automatically generated pre-annotations. Finally, the conclusions of this thesis and possible future research lines are presented