Real-Time Vision-based Detection of Waiting Pedestrians

Abstract

This paper presents a real-time digital signal processing system to detect the presence of pedestrians waiting to cross an intersection. A pedestrian detection algorithm is developed and implemented on a Texas Instruments TMS320C40 digital signal processor (DSP) chip such that videosignals captured and transmitted from an actual intersection are processed in real-time. The detection algorithm consists of a background update and background subtraction components applied to image blocks. The background update is done in order to cope with brightness changes that occur in actual outdoor scenes. In addition, waiting and moving pedestrians are distinguished by using the temporal changes of image block intensities. The results obtained indicate that this DSP implementation provides an acceptable detection rate for this traffic management problem.