Alysis of Vehicle-Pedestrian Interactive Behaviors near Unsignalized Crosswalk

Abstract

Even though advancement of information communication technologies (ICT) leads to improving the quality of life in the overall fields, road traffic accidents globally posed a severe threat to human lives and have become a leading cause of premature deaths. In particular, the casualties of pedestrian crossing the road present a major cause in vehicle-pedestrian accidents in South Korea, but we lack dense behavioral data to understand the risk they face. In this paper, we propose a new analytical system for potential pedestrian risk event based on video footage obtained by road security cameras already deployed at unsignalized crosswalks. Our system can automatically extract the behavioral features of vehicles and pedestrians, affecting the likelihood of the potentially dangerous situations after detecting them into individual objects. In our experiments, we handle only four behavioral features such as vehicle velocity, pedestrian position, vehicle-pedestrian distance, and vehicle-crosswalk distance. Then, in order to show how they can be useful for monitoring the traffic behaviors on the road, we visualize and interpret them to show how they may or may not contribute to potential pedestrian risks of these crosswalks: 1) by analyzing car velocity changes near the crosswalk when there are no pedestrians present; and 2) analyzing car velocities by vehicle-pedestrian distances when pedestrians are on the crosswalk. We validate the feasibility of the propose system by applying our system to multiple unsignalized crosswalks in Osan city, South Korea.