Detection of Distracted Pedestrians using Convolutional Neural Networks

The risk of pedestrian accidents has increased due to the distracted walking increase. The research in the autonomous vehicles industry aims to minimize this risk by enhancing the route planning to produce safer routes. Detecting distracted pedestrians plays a significant role in identifying safer routes and hence decreases pedestrian accident risk. Thus, this research aims to investigate how to use the convolutional neural networks for building an algorithm that significantly improves the accuracy of detecting distracted pedestrians based on gathered cues. Particularly, this research involves the analysis of pedestrian’ images to identify distracted pedestrians who are not paying attention when crossing the road. This work tested three different architectures of convolutional neural networks. These architectures are Basic, Deep, and AlexNet. The performance of the three architectures was evaluated based on two datasets. The first is a new training dataset called SCIT and created by this work based on recorded videos of volunteers from Sheridan College Institute of Technology. The second is a public dataset called PETA, which was made up of images with various resolutions. The ConvNet model with the Deep architecture outperformed the Basic and AlexNet architectures in detecting distracted pedestrians

An Investigation of a Convolution Neural Network Architecture for Detecting Distracted Pedestrians

The risk of pedestrian accidents has increased due to the distracted walking increase. The research in the autonomous vehicles industry aims to minimize this risk by enhancing the route planning to produce safer routes. Detecting distracted pedestrians plays a significant role in identifying safer routes and hence decreases pedestrian accident risk. Thus, this research aims to investigate how to use the convolutional neural networks for building an algorithm that significantly improves the accuracy of detecting distracted pedestrians based on gathered cues. Particularly, this research involves the analysis of pedestrian’ images to identify distracted pedestrians who are not paying attention when crossing the road. This work tested three different architectures of convolutional neural networks. These architectures are Basic, Deep, and AlexNet. The performance of the three architectures was evaluated based on two datasets. The first is a new training dataset called SCIT and created by this work based on recorded videos of volunteers from Sheridan College Institute of Technology. The second is a public dataset called PETA, which was made up of images with various resolutions. The ConvNet model with the Deep architecture outperformed the Basic and AlexNet architectures in detecting distracted pedestrian

Detecting phone-related pedestrian distracted behaviours via a two-branch convolutional neural network

The distracted phone-use behaviours among pedestrians, like Texting, Game Playing and Phone Calls, have caused increasing fatalities and injuries. However, the research of phonerelated distracted behaviour by pedestrians has not been systemically studied. It is desired to improve both the driving and pedestrian safety by automatically discovering the phonerelated pedestrian distracted behaviours. Herein, a new computer vision-based method is proposed to detect the phone-related pedestrian distracted behaviours from a view of intelligent and autonomous driving. Specifically, the first end-to-end deep learning based Two-Branch Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is designed for this task. Taking one synchronised image pair by two front on-car GoPro cameras as the inputs, the proposed two-branch CNN will extract features for each camera, fuse the extracted features and perform a robust classification. This method can also be easily extended to video-based classification by confidence accumulation and voting. A new benchmark dataset of 448 synchronised video pairs of 53,760 images collected on a vehicle is proposed for this research. The experimental results show that using two synchronised cameras obtained better performance than using one single camera. Finally, the proposed method achieved an overall best classification accuracy of 84.3% on the new benchmark when compared to other methods

Trust-aware Safe Control for Autonomous Navigation: Estimation of System-to-human Trust for Trust-adaptive Control Barrier Functions

A trust-aware safe control system for autonomous navigation in the presence of humans, specifically pedestrians, is presented. The system combines model predictive control (MPC) with control barrier functions (CBFs) and trust estimation to ensure safe and reliable navigation in complex environments. Pedestrian trust values are computed based on features, extracted from camera sensor images, such as mutual eye contact and smartphone usage. These trust values are integrated into the MPC controller's CBF constraints, allowing the autonomous vehicle to make informed decisions considering pedestrian behavior. Simulations conducted in the CARLA driving simulator demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system, showcasing more conservative behaviour around inattentive pedestrians and vice versa. The results highlight the practicality of the system in real-world applications, providing a promising approach to enhance the safety and reliability of autonomous navigation systems, especially self-driving vehicles