Computer vision-based framework for pedestrian movement direction recognition

Abstract

Pedestrians are the most critical and vulnerable moving objects on roads and public areas. Learning pedestrian movement in these areas can be helpful for their safety. To improve pedestrian safety and enable driver assistance in autonomous driver assistance systems, recognition of the pedestrian direction of motion plays an important role. Pedestrian movement direction recognition in real world monitoring and ADAS systems are challenging due to the unavailability of large annotated data. Even if labeled data is available, partial occlusion, body pose, illumination and the untrimmed nature of videos poses another problem. In this paper, we propose a framework that considers the origin and end point of the pedestrian trajectory named origin-end-point incremental clustering (OEIC). The proposed framework searches for strong spatial linkage by finding neighboring lines for every OE (origin-end) lines around the circular area of the end points. It adopts entropy and Q measure for parameter selection of radius and minimum lines for clustering. To obtain origin and end point coordinates, we perform pedestrian detection using the deep learning technique YOLOv5, followed by tracking the detected pedestrian across the frame using our proposed pedestrian tracking algorithm. We test our framework on the publicly available pedestrian movement direction recognition dataset and compare it with DBSCAN and Trajectory clustering model for its efficacy. The results show that the OEIC framework provides efficient clusters with optimal radius and minlines.