Understanding Pedestrian Behavior in Complex Traffic Scenes

Designing autonomous vehicles for urban environments remains an unresolved problem. One major dilemma faced by autonomous cars is understanding the intention of other road users and communicating with them. To investigate one aspect of this, specifically pedestrian crossing behavior, we have collected a large dataset of pedestrian samples at crosswalks under various conditions (e.g., weather) and in different types of roads. Using the data, we analyzed pedestrian behavior from two different perspectives: the way they communicate with drivers prior to crossing and the factors that influence their behavior. Our study shows that changes in head orientation in the form of looking or glancing at the traffic is a strong indicator of crossing intention. We also found that context in the form of the properties of a crosswalk (e.g., its width), traffic dynamics (e.g., speed of the vehicles) as well as pedestrian demographics can alter pedestrian behavior after the initial intention of crossing has been displayed. Our findings suggest that the contextual elements can be interrelated, meaning that the presence of one factor may increase/decrease the influence of other factors. Overall, our work formulates the problem of pedestrian-driver interaction and sheds light on its complexity in typical traffic scenarios.

[1]  Bernhard Friedrich,et al.  The Effect of Autonomous Vehicles on Traffic , 2016 .

[2]  Sarah Schmidt,et al.  Pedestrians at the kerb – Recognising the action intentions of humans , 2009 .

[3]  Tom Michael Gasser.  Fundamental and Special Legal Questions for Autonomous Vehicles , 2016 .

[4]  William Whittaker,et al.  Autonomous driving in urban environments: Boss and the Urban Challenge , 2008, J. Field Robotics.

[5]  Matt Richtel,et al.  Google’s Driverless Cars Run into Problem: Cars with Drivers , 2015 .

[6]  Aurelio Piazzi,et al.  THE ARGO AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE'S VISION AND CONTROL SYSTEMS , 1999 .

[7]  Berthold Färber,et al.  Communication and Communication Problems Between Autonomous Vehicles and Human Drivers , 2016 .

[8]  R Risser,et al.  Behavior in traffic conflict situations. , 1985, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[9]  C. Michaels,et al.  To Cross or Not to Cross: The Effect of Locomotion on Street-Crossing Behavior , 1996 .

[10]  George Yannis,et al.  A critical assessment of pedestrian behaviour models , 2009 .

[11]  Anders Lindgren,et al.  Requirements for the Design of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems - The Differences between Swedish and Chinese Drivers , 2008 .

[12]  Wendy Ju,et al.  Ghost driver: A field study investigating the interaction between pedestrians and driverless vehicles , 2016, 2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).

[13]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Stanley: The robot that won the DARPA Grand Challenge , 2006, J. Field Robotics.

[14]  Ralf Risser,et al.  Pedestrian-driver communication and decision strategies at marked crossings. , 2017, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[15]  Dariu Gavrila,et al.  Analysis of pedestrian dynamics from a vehicle perspective , 2014, 2014 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium Proceedings.

[16]  Robert B. Noland,et al.  Behavioural Issues in Pedestrian Speed Choice and Street Crossing Behaviour: A Review , 2008 .

[17]  Mohan M. Trivedi,et al.  Trajectory analysis and prediction for improved pedestrian safety: Integrated framework and evaluations , 2015, 2015 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV).

[18]  Fabian Kröger,et al.  Automated Driving in Its Social, Historical and Cultural Contexts , 2016 .

[19]  Dariu Gavrila,et al.  Context-Based Pedestrian Path Prediction , 2014, ECCV.

[20]  E. D. Dickmanns,et al.  A Curvature-based Scheme for Improving Road Vehicle Guidance by Computer Vision , 1987, Other Conferences.

[21]  D. Clay,et al.  Driver attitude and attribution : implications for accident prevention , 1995 .

[22]  David Hsu,et al.  Intention-aware online POMDP planning for autonomous driving in a crowd , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[23]  Ingo Wolf.  The Interaction Between Humans and Autonomous Agents , 2016 .

[24]  Christoph Schroth,et al.  Car-to-Car Communication , 2006 .

[25]  Gerald J.S. Wilde,et al.  Immediate and delayed social interaction in road user behaviour , 1980 .

[26]  Satish V. Ukkusuri,et al.  Modeling of Motorist-Pedestrian Interaction at Uncontrolled Mid-block Crosswalks , 2003 .

[27]  Feng Jiang,et al.  Pedestrian behavior analysis using 110-car naturalistic driving data in USA , 2013 .

[28]  Mike McDonald,et al.  Study of pedestrians' gap acceptance behavior when they jaywalk outside crossing facilities , 2010, 13th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[29]  Patrick Heinemann,et al.  Context-based detection of pedestrian crossing intention for autonomous driving in urban environments , 2016, 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[30]  Li-Ta Hsu,et al.  Probability estimation for pedestrian crossing intention at signalized crosswalks , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Vehicular Electronics and Safety (ICVES).

[31]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  A data-driven approach for pedestrian intention estimation , 2016, 2016 IEEE 19th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC).

[32]  Tobias Lagström,et al.  AVIP - Autonomous vehicles' interaction with pedestrians - An investigation of pedestrian-driver communication and development of a vehicle external interface , 2016 .