Occlusion aware sensor fusion for early crossing pedestrian detection

Early and accurate detection of crossing pedestrians is crucial in automated driving to execute emergency manoeuvres in time. This is a challenging task in urban scenarios however, where people are often occluded (not visible) behind objects, e.g. other parked vehicles. In this paper, an occlusion aware multi-modal sensor fusion system is proposed to address scenarios with crossing pedestrians behind parked vehicles. Our proposed method adjusts the detection rate in different areas based on sensor visibility. We argue that using this occlusion information can help to evaluate the measurements. Our experiments on real world data show that fusing radar and stereo camera for such tasks is beneficial, and that including occlusion into the model helps to detect pedestrians earlier and more accurately.