A Workable Solution for Reducing the Large Number of Vehicle and Pedestrian Accidents Occurring on a Yellow Light

Traffic intersections are incredibly dangerous for drivers and pedestrians. Statistics from both Canada and the U.S. show a high number of fatalities and serious injuries related to crashes at intersections. In Canada, during 2019, the National Collision Database shows that 28% of traffic fatalities and 42% of serious injuries occurred at intersections. Likewise, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Administration (NHTSA) found that about 40% of the estimated 5,811,000 accidents in the U.S. during the year studied were intersection-related crashes. In fact, a major survey by the car insurance industry found that nearly 85% of drivers could not identify the correct action to take when approaching a yellow traffic light at an intersection. One major reason for these accidents is the “yellow light dilemma,” the ambiguous situation where a driver should stop or proceed forward when unexpectedly faced with a yellow light. This situation is even further exacerbated by the tendency of aggressive drivers to inappropriately speed up on the yellow just to get through the traffic light. A survey of Canadian drivers conducted by the Traffic Injury Research Foundation found that 9% of drivers admitted to speeding up to get through a traffic light. Another reason for these accidents is the increased danger of making a left-hand turn on yellow. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA), left turns occur in approximately 22.2% of collisions—as opposed to just 1.2% for right turns. Moreover, a study by CNN found left turns are three times as likely to kill pedestrians than right turns. The reason left turns are so much more likely to cause an accident is because they take a driver against traffic and in the path of oncoming cars. Additionally, most of these left turns occur at the driver’s discretion—as opposed to the distressingly brief left-hand arrow at busy intersections. Drive Safe Now proposes a workable solution for reducing the number of accidents occurring during a yellow light at intersections. We believe this fairly simple solution will save lives, prevent injuries, reduce damage to public and private property, and decrease insurance costs.

Pedestrian lane formation with following–overtaking model and measurement of system order

Pedestrian self-organizing movement plays a significant role in evacuation studies and architectural design.Lane formation,a typical self-organizing phenomenon,helps pedestrian system to become more orderly,the majority of following behavior model and overtaking behavior model are imprecise and unrealistic compared with pedestrian movement in the real world.In this study,a pedestrian dynamic model considering detailed modelling of the following behavior and overtaking behavior is constructed,and a method of measuring the lane formation and pedestrian system order based on information entropy is proposed.Simulation and analysis demonstrate that the following and avoidance behaviors are important factors of lane formation.A high tendency of following results in good lane formation.Both non-selective following behavior and aggressive overtaking behavior cause the system order to decrease.The most orderly following strategy for a pedestrian is to overtake the former pedestrian whose speed is lower than approximately 70%of his own.The influence of the obstacle layout on pedestrian lane and egress efficiency is also studied with this model.The presence of a small obstacle does not obstruct the walking of pedestrians;in contrast,it may help to improve the egress efficiency by guiding the pedestrian flow and mitigating the reduction of pedestrian system orderliness.

Hybrid pedestrian positioning system using wearable inertial sensors and ultrasonic ranging

Pedestrian positioning system(PPS)using wearable inertial sensors has wide applications towards various emerging fields such as smart healthcare,emergency rescue,soldier positioning,etc.The performance of traditional PPS is limited by the cumulative error of inertial sensors,complex motion modes of pedestrians,and the low robustness of the multi-sensor collaboration structure.This paper presents a hybrid pedestrian positioning system using the combination of wearable inertial sensors and ultrasonic ranging(H-PPS).A robust two nodes integration structure is developed to adaptively combine the motion data acquired from the single waist-mounted and foot-mounted node,and enhanced by a novel ellipsoid constraint model.In addition,a deep-learning-based walking speed estimator is proposed by considering all the motion features provided by different nodes,which effectively reduces the cumulative error originating from inertial sensors.Finally,a comprehensive data and model dual-driven model is presented to effectively combine the motion data provided by different sensor nodes and walking speed estimator,and multi-level constraints are extracted to further improve the performance of the overall system.Experimental results indicate that the proposed H-PPS significantly improves the performance of the single PPS and outperforms existing algorithms in accuracy index under complex indoor scenarios.

IR-YOLO: Real-Time Infrared Vehicle and Pedestrian Detection

Road traffic safety can decrease when drivers drive in a low-visibility environment.The application of visual perception technology to detect vehicles and pedestrians in infrared images proves to be an effective means of reducing the risk of accidents.To tackle the challenges posed by the low recognition accuracy and the substan-tial computational burden associated with current infrared pedestrian-vehicle detection methods,an infrared pedestrian-vehicle detection method A proposal is presented,based on an enhanced version of You Only Look Once version 5(YOLOv5).First,A head specifically designed for detecting small targets has been integrated into the model to make full use of shallow feature information to enhance the accuracy in detecting small targets.Second,the Focal Generalized Intersection over Union(GIoU)is employed as an alternative to the original loss function to address issues related to target overlap and category imbalance.Third,the distribution shift convolution optimization feature extraction operator is used to alleviate the computational burden of the model without significantly compromising detection accuracy.The test results of the improved algorithm show that its average accuracy(mAP)reaches 90.1%.Specifically,the Giga Floating Point Operations Per second(GFLOPs)of the improved algorithm is only 9.1.In contrast,the improved algorithms outperformed the other algorithms on similar GFLOPs,such as YOLOv6n(11.9),YOLOv8n(8.7),YOLOv7t(13.2)and YOLOv5s(16.0).The mAPs that are 4.4%,3%,3.5%,and 1.7%greater than those of these algorithms show that the improved algorithm achieves higher accuracy in target detection tasks under similar computational resource overhead.On the other hand,compared with other algorithms such as YOLOv8l(91.1%),YOLOv6l(89.5%),YOLOv7(90.8%),and YOLOv3(90.1%),the improved algorithm needs only 5.5%,2.3%,8.6%,and 2.3%,respectively,of the GFLOPs.The improved algorithm has shown significant advancements in balancing accuracy and computational efficiency,making it promising for practical use in resource-limited scenarios.

Method of improving pedestrian navigation performance based on chest card

With the development of positioning technology,loca-tion services are constantly in demand by people.As a primary location service pedestrian navigation has two main approaches based on radio and inertial navigation.The pedestrian naviga-tion based on radio is subject to environmental occlusion lead-ing to the degradation of positioning accuracy.The pedestrian navigation based on micro-electro-mechanical system inertial measurement unit(MIMU)is less susceptible to environmental interference,but its errors dissipate over time.In this paper,a chest card pedestrian navigation improvement method based on complementary correction is proposed in order to suppress the error divergence of inertial navigation methods.To suppress atti-tude errors,optimal feedback coefficients are established by pedestrian motion characteristics.To extend navigation time and improve positioning accuracy,the step length in subsequent movements is compensated by the first step length.The experi-mental results show that the positioning accuracy of the pro-posed method is improved by more than 47%and 44%com-pared with the pure inertia-based method combined with step compensation and the traditional complementary filtering com-bined method with step compensation.The proposed method can effectively suppress the error dispersion and improve the positioning accuracy.

Lightweight Cross-Modal Multispectral Pedestrian Detection Based on Spatial Reweighted Attention Mechanism

Multispectral pedestrian detection technology leverages infrared images to provide reliable information for visible light images, demonstrating significant advantages in low-light conditions and background occlusion scenarios. However, while continuously improving cross-modal feature extraction and fusion, ensuring the model’s detection speed is also a challenging issue. We have devised a deep learning network model for cross-modal pedestrian detection based on Resnet50, aiming to focus on more reliable features and enhance the model’s detection efficiency. This model employs a spatial attention mechanism to reweight the input visible light and infrared image data, enhancing the model’s focus on different spatial positions and sharing the weighted feature data across different modalities, thereby reducing the interference of multi-modal features. Subsequently, lightweight modules with depthwise separable convolution are incorporated to reduce the model’s parameter count and computational load through channel-wise and point-wise convolutions. The network model algorithm proposed in this paper was experimentally validated on the publicly available KAIST dataset and compared with other existing methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves favorable performance in various complex environments, affirming the effectiveness of the multispectral pedestrian detection technology proposed in this paper.

Measuring Pedestrian Stress Response (MPSR) Using Wearable Technologies

Walkability is an essential aspect of urban transportation systems. Properly designed walking paths can enhance transportation safety, encourage pedestrian activity, and improve community quality of life. This, in turn, can help achieve sustainable development goals in urban areas. This pilot study uses wearable technology data to present a new method for measuring pedestrian stress in urban environments and the results were presented as an interactive geographic information system map to support risk-informed decision-making. The approach involves analyzing data from wearable devices using heart rate variability (RMSSD and slope analysis) to identify high-stress locations. This data-driven approach can help urban planners and safety experts identify and address pedestrian stressors, ultimately creating safer, more walkable cities. The study addresses a significant challenge in pedestrian safety by providing insights into factors and locations that trigger stress in pedestrians. During the pilot study, high-stress pedestrian experiences were identified due to issues like pedestrian-scooter interaction on pedestrian paths, pedestrian behavior around high foot traffic areas, and poor visibility at pedestrian crossings due to inadequate lighting.

An Application of RGBD-Based Skeleton Reconstruction for Pedestrian Detection and Occlusion Handling

This study explores the challenges posed by pedestrian detection and occlusion in AR applications, employing a novel approach that utilizes RGB-D-based skeleton reconstruction to reduce the overhead of classical pedestrian detection algorithms during training. Furthermore, it is dedicated to addressing occlusion issues in pedestrian detection by using Azure Kinect for body tracking and integrating a robust occlusion management algorithm, significantly enhancing detection efficiency. In experiments, an average latency of 204 milliseconds was measured, and the detection accuracy reached an outstanding level of 97%. Additionally, this approach has been successfully applied in creating a simple yet captivating augmented reality game, demonstrating the practical application of the algorithm.

Pedestrian evacuation simulation in multi-exit case:An emotion and group dual-driven method

This paper analyzes the characteristics of emotion state and group behavior in the evacuation process.During the emergency evacuation,emotion state and group behavior are interacting with each other,and indivisible.The emotion spread model with the effect of group behavior,and the leader-follower model with the effect of emotion state are proposed.On this basis,exit choice strategies with the effect of emotion state and group behavior are proposed.Fusing emotion spread model,leader-follower model,and exit choice strategies into a cellular automata(CA)-based pedestrian simulation model,we simulate the evacuation process in a multi-exit case.Simulation results indicate that panic emotion and group behavior are two negative influence factors for pedestrian evacuation.Compared with panic emotion or group behavior only,pedestrian evacuation efficiency with the effects of both is lower.

Effect of a static pedestrian as an exit obstacle on evacuation

Building exit as a bottleneck structure is the last and the most congested stage in building evacuation.It is well known that obstacles at the exit affect the evacuation process,but few researchers pay attention to the effect of stationary pedestrians(the elderly with slow speed,the injured,and the static evacuation guide)as obstacles at the exit on the evacuation process.This paper explores the influence of the presence of a stationary pedestrian as an obstacle at the exit on the evacuation from experiments and simulations.We use a software,Pathfinder,based on the agent-based model to study the effect of ratios of exit width(D)to distance(d)between the static pedestrian and the exit,the asymmetric structure by shifting the static pedestrian upward,and types of obstacles on evacuation.Results show that the evacuation time of scenes with a static pedestrian is longer than that of scenes with an obstacle due to the unexpected hindering effect of the static pedestrian.Different ratios of D/d have different effects on evacuation efficiency.Among the five D/d ratios in this paper,the evacuation efficiency is the largest when d is equal to 0.75D,and the existence of the static pedestrian has a positive impact on evacuation in this condition.The influence of the asymmetric structure of the static pedestrian on evacuation efficiency is affected by D/d.This study can provide a theoretical basis for crowd management and evacuation plan near the exit of complex buildings and facilities.

Multiple Pedestrian Detection and Tracking in Night Vision Surveillance Systems

Pedestrian detection and tracking are vital elements of today’s surveillance systems,which make daily life safe for humans.Thus,human detection and visualization have become essential inventions in the field of computer vision.Hence,developing a surveillance system with multiple object recognition and tracking,especially in low light and night-time,is still challenging.Therefore,we propose a novel system based on machine learning and image processing to provide an efficient surveillance system for pedestrian detection and tracking at night.In particular,we propose a system that tackles a two-fold problem by detecting multiple pedestrians in infrared(IR)images using machine learning and tracking them using particle filters.Moreover,a random forest classifier is adopted for image segmentation to identify pedestrians in an image.The result of detection is investigated by particle filter to solve pedestrian tracking.Through the extensive experiment,our system shows 93%segmentation accuracy using a random forest algorithm that demonstrates high accuracy for background and roof classes.Moreover,the system achieved a detection accuracy of 90%usingmultiple templatematching techniques and 81%accuracy for pedestrian tracking.Furthermore,our system can identify that the detected object is a human.Hence,our system provided the best results compared to the state-ofart systems,which proves the effectiveness of the techniques used for image segmentation,classification,and tracking.The presented method is applicable for human detection/tracking,crowd analysis,and monitoring pedestrians in IR video surveillance.

Tracking Pedestrians Under Occlusion in Parking Space

Many traffic accidents occur in parking lots.One of the serious safety risks is vehicle-pedestrian conflict.Moreover,with the increasing development of automatic driving and parking technology,parking safety has received significant attention from vehicle safety analysts.However,pedestrian protection in parking lots still faces many challenges.For example,the physical structure of a parking lot may be complex,and dead corners would occur when the vehicle density is high.These lead to pedestrians’sudden appearance in the vehicle’s path from an unexpected position,resulting in collision accidents in the parking lot.We advocate that besides vehicular sensing data,high-precision digital map of the parking lot,pedestrians’smart device’s sensing data,and attribute information of pedestrians can be used to detect the position of pedestrians in the parking lot.However,this subject has not been studied and explored in existing studies.Tofill this void,this paper proposes a pedestrian tracking framework integrating multiple information sources to provide pedestrian position and status information for vehicles and protect pedestrians in parking spaces.We also evaluate the proposed method through real-world experiments.The experimental results show that the proposed framework has its advantage in pedestrian attribute information extraction and positioning accuracy.It can also be used for pedestrian tracking in parking spaces.

Pedestrian and Vehicle Detection Based on Pruning YOLOv4 with Cloud-Edge Collaboration

Nowadays,the rapid development of edge computing has driven an increasing number of deep learning applications deployed at the edge of the network,such as pedestrian and vehicle detection,to provide efficient intelligent services to mobile users.However,as the accuracy requirements continue to increase,the components of deep learning models for pedestrian and vehicle detection,such as YOLOv4,become more sophisticated and the computing resources required for model training are increasing dramatically,which in turn leads to significant challenges in achieving effective deployment on resource-constrained edge devices while ensuring the high accuracy performance.For addressing this challenge,a cloud-edge collaboration-based pedestrian and vehicle detection framework is proposed in this paper,which enables sufficient training of models by utilizing the abundant computing resources in the cloud,and then deploying the well-trained models on edge devices,thus reducing the computing resource requirements for model training on edge devices.Furthermore,to reduce the size of the model deployed on edge devices,an automatic pruning method combines the convolution layer and BN layer is proposed to compress the pedestrian and vehicle detection model size.Experimental results show that the framework proposed in this paper is able to deploy the pruned model on a real edge device,Jetson TX2,with 6.72 times higher FPS.Meanwhile,the channel pruning reduces the volume and the number of parameters to 96.77%for the model,and the computing amount is reduced to 81.37%.

Pedestrian street and its effect on economic sustainability of a historical Middle Eastern city:The case of Chaharbagh Abbasi in Isfahan,Iran

Pedestrianization is an urban revitalization strategy to enhance sustainability and livability in car-oriented cities.Despite many studies in this research field,the effects of pedestrianization on the economy of cities in developing countries still need further investigation.Additionally,the impact of this strategy on the tenant mix of com-mercial and historical areas in Middle East countries is nebulous.To address these inadequacies,we considered Chaharbagh Abbasi street,located in the heart of Isfahan,Iran,and investigated the impact of a pedestrianization project with particular emphasis on how it affects the economic sustainability of existent commercial fabric.Pre-and post-project data along with field observations and quantifications used to assess structural replacements in trade,were analyzed with SPSS and ArcGIS software.The results revealed unexpected outcomes,such as the closure of some traditional businesses(27.5%),a stagnation in sales(69%)and a decrease in job offers(84%)leading the local economy to a fragile situation.Conversely,it was found that the footfall volume increased by 64% and 73% from the retailers’and pedestrians’viewpoints.This evolution along with a wide opening of food and beverage stores(approximately 60%)makes the post-pedestrianization results more promising than earlier predictions.In conclusion,these findings reinforce the importance of pedestrian streets in revitalizing economic activities in historical and commercial areas from the perspective of economic sustainability.Due to the lack of similar investigations in Middle East countries,these findings can support decision-makers and urban planners to take preventive measures in preserving the diversity of individual small shops for upcoming urban rehabilitation projects in terms of pedestrianization.

A Real-Time Pedestrian Social Distancing Risk Alert System for COVID-19

The COVID-19 virus is usually spread by small droplets when talking,coughing and sneezing,so maintaining physical distance between people is necessary to slow the spread of the virus.The World Health Organization(WHO)recommends maintaining a social distance of at least six feet.In this paper,we developed a real-time pedestrian social distance risk alert system for COVID-19,whichmonitors the distance between people in real-time via video streaming and provides risk alerts to the person in charge,thus avoiding the problem of too close social distance between pedestrians in public places.We design a lightweight convolutional neural network architecture to detect the distance between people more accurately.In addition,due to the limitation of camera placement,the previous algorithm based on flat view is not applicable to the social distance calculation for cameras,so we designed and developed a perspective conversion module to reduce the image in the video to a bird’s eye view,which can avoid the error caused by the elevation view and thus provide accurate risk indication to the user.We selected images containing only person labels in theCOCO2017 dataset to train our networkmodel.The experimental results show that our network model achieves 82.3%detection accuracy and performs significantly better than other mainstream network architectures in the three metrics of Recall,Precision and mAP,proving the effectiveness of our system and the efficiency of our technology.

Segmentation Based Real Time Anomaly Detection and Tracking Model for Pedestrian Walkways

Presently,video surveillance is commonly employed to ensure security in public places such as traffic signals,malls,railway stations,etc.A major chal-lenge in video surveillance is the identification of anomalies that exist in it such as crimes,thefts,and so on.Besides,the anomaly detection in pedestrian walkways has gained significant attention among the computer vision communities to enhance pedestrian safety.The recent advances of Deep Learning(DL)models have received considerable attention in different processes such as object detec-tion,image classification,etc.In this aspect,this article designs a new Panoptic Feature Pyramid Network based Anomaly Detection and Tracking(PFPN-ADT)model for pedestrian walkways.The proposed model majorly aims to the recognition and classification of different anomalies present in the pedestrian walkway like vehicles,skaters,etc.The proposed model involves panoptic seg-mentation model,called Panoptic Feature Pyramid Network(PFPN)is employed for the object recognition process.For object classification,Compact Bat Algo-rithm(CBA)with Stacked Auto Encoder(SAE)is applied for the classification of recognized objects.For ensuring the enhanced results better anomaly detection performance of the PFPN-ADT technique,a comparison study is made using Uni-versity of California San Diego(UCSD)Anomaly data and other benchmark data-sets(such as Cityscapes,ADE20K,COCO),and the outcomes are compared with the Mask Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network(RCNN)and Faster Convolu-tional Neural Network(CNN)models.The simulation outcome demonstrated the enhanced performance of the PFPN-ADT technique over the other methods.

Renewal Design of Pedestrian Bridges from the Perspective of Environmental Behaviors

With the continuous deepening of urbanization,the focus of urban construction has shifted to internal renewal,and the phenomenon of decreased vitality caused by the spatial limitations of pedestrian bridges with a single transportation function as the main focus has gradually emerged.Based on this,environmental behavior theory is used to seek the convergence point between the material space and behavioral activities of pedestrian bridges to solve this dilemma.In this paper,the pedestrian bridge of Southwest Hospital of Army Medical University is taken as an example.Starting from the three types of spaces of pedestrian bridges,through behavior observation,interview research,and data analysis,the correlation between the material space of pedestrian bridges and the behavioral characteristics of the population is analyzed,stimulating the spatial vitality of pedestrian bridges,and providing reference for the sustainable development,construction,and renovation of pedestrian bridges.

Method for pedestrian signal timing at signalized intersections

The pedestrian timing at signalized intersections is studied aiming at the problems of the inconsistency of the vehicular and pedestrian timing requirements and the insufficiency of pedestrian clearance. Based on the formulae of WALK and flashing DON＇T WALK （FDW） in the highway capacity manual （HCM）, the relationship between pedestrian signal indications and vehicular signal indications is discussed using the theory of traffic flow. Then, methods of pedestrian timing for different cases are established, particularly the methods of the pedestrian green adjustment. Ways of pedestrian crossing are analyzed for roadways with different forms and widths of the median island. The sampling values of calculation parameters are studied, and the recommended formulae of pedestrian timing for different conditions are presented.

Plant Landscape Design for Commercial Pedestrian Streets

In view of the deficiencies in landscaping of commercial pedestrian streets,this study elaborated the functions of plant landscapes,such as improving the street environment,beautifying the street,creating spaces of diversified uses,and attracting more pedestrians.On the basis of this,plant landscape design principles and techniques for commercial pedestrian streets were put forward,by combining with successful cases,relevant design suggestions were given for particular streets or environments,so as to provide references for the landscaping of commercial pedestrian streets.

Influence of driver’s yielding behavior on pedestrian-vehicle conflicts at a two-lane roundabout using fuzzy cellular automata

The roundabouts are widely used in China,some of which have central islands as scenic spots.The crosswalks connecting to the central islands,normally full of pedestrians,have negative impact on roundabout capability and pedestrian safety.Therefore,this study proposes a fuzzy cellular automata(FCA)model to explore the safety and efficiency impacts of pedestrian-vehicle conflicts at a two-lane roundabout.To reason the decision-making process of individual drivers before crosswalks,membership functions in the fuzzy inference system were calibrated with field data conducted in Changsha,China.Using specific indicators of efficiency and safety performance,it was shown that circulating vehicles can move smoothly in low traffic flow,but the roundabout system is prone to the traffic congestion if traffic flow reaches to a certain level.Also,the high yielding rate of drivers has a negative impact on the traffic efficiency but can improve pedestrian safety.Furthermore,a pedestrian restriction measure was deduced for the roundabout crosswalk from the FCA model and national guideline of setting traffic lights.