Estimation of Driver's Insight for Safe Passing based on Pedestrian Attributes

Abstract

In order to reduce traffic accidents between a vehicle and a pedestrian, recognition of a pedestrian who has a possibility of collision with a vehicle should be helpful. However, since a pedestrian may suddenly change his/her direction and cross the road, it is difficult to predict his/her behavior directly. Here, we focus on the fact that experienced drivers usually pass by a pedestrian while preparing to step on the brake at any moment when they feel danger. If driver assistant systems can estimate such experienced driver's decisions, they could early detect the pedestrian in danger of collision. Therefore, we classify the driver's decisions into three types by referring to the accelerator operation of drivers, and propose a method to estimate the type of the driver's decision. The drivers are considered to decide their actions focusing on various behaviors and states of a pedestrian, namely pedestrian's attributes. Since the driver's decisions change along the timeline, the use of a temporal context is considered to be effective. Thus, in this paper, we propose an estimation method using a recurrent neural network architecture with the pedestrian's attributes as input. We constructed a dataset collected by experienced drivers in control of the vehicle and evaluated the performance, and then confirmed the effectiveness of the use of pedestrian's attributes.