Study on the Framework of Intersection Pedestrian Collision Warning System Considering Pedestrian Characteristics

Abstract

One of the most widely used advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for preventing pedestrian–vehicle collisions is the intersection collision warning system (ICWS). Most previous ICWSs have been implemented with in-vehicle distance sensors, such as radar and lidar. However, the existing ICWSs show some weaknesses in alerting drivers at intersections because of limited detection range and field-of-view. Furthermore, these ICWSs have difficulties in identifying the pedestrian’s crossing intention because the distance sensors cannot capture pedestrian characteristics such as age, gender, and head orientation. To alleviate these defects, this study proposes a novel framework for vision sensor-based ICWS under a cloud-based communication environment, which is called the intersection pedestrian collision warning system (IPCWS). The IPCWS gives a collision warning to drivers approaching an intersection by predicting the pedestrian’s crossing intention based on various machine learning models. With real traffic data extracted by image processing in the IPCWS, a comparison study is conducted to evaluate the performance of the IPCWS in relation to warning timing. The comparison study demonstrates that the IPCWS shows better performance than conventional ICWSs. This result suggests that the proposed system has a great potential for preventing pedestrian–vehicle collisions by capturing the pedestrian’s crossing intention.