Recognition of pedestrian trajectories and attributes with computer vision and deep learning techniques

Abstract

Analyzing the walking behavior of the public is vital for revealing the need for infrastructure design in a local neighborhood, supporting human-centric urban area development. Traditional walking behavior analysis practices relying on manual on-street surveys to collect pedestrian flow data are labor-intensive and tedious. On the contrary, automated video analytics using surveillance cameras based on computer vision and deep learning techniques appears more effective in generating pedestrian flow statistics. Nevertheless, most existing methods of pedestrian tracking and attribute recognition suffer from several challenging conditions, such as inter-person occlusion and appearance variations, which leads to ambiguous identities and hence inaccurate pedestrian flow statistics.Therefore, this paper proposes a more robust methodology of pedestrian tracking and attribute recognition, facilitating the analysis of pedestrian walking behavior. Specific limitations of a current state-of-the-art method are inferred, based on which several improvement strategies are proposed: 1) incorporating high-level pedestrian attributes to enhance pedestrian tracking, 2) a similarity measure integrating multiple cues for identity matching, and 3) a probation mechanism for more robust identity matching. From our evaluation using two public benchmark datasets, the developed strategies notably enhance the robustness of pedestrian tracking against the challenging conditions mentioned above. Subsequently, the outputs of trajectories and attributes are aggregated into fine-grained pedestrian flow statistics among different pedestrian groups. Overall, our developed framework can support a more comprehensive and reliable decision-making for human-centric planning and design in different urban areas. The framework is also applicable to exploiting pedestrian movement patterns in different scenes for analyses such as urban walkability evaluation. Moreover, the developed mechanisms are generalizable to future researches as a baseline, which provides generic insights of how to fundamentally enhance pedestrian tracking.