Video based estimation of pedestrian walking direction for pedestrian protection system

Pedestrian protection has played an important role for driver assistance systems. Our aim is to develop a video based driver assistance system for the detection of the potentially dangerous situation between the vehicle and pedestrian, in order to warn the driver. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting pedestrian in real-world scenes and estimation of the walking direction with a single camera from a moving vehicle. Considering all the available cues for predicting the possibility of collision is very important. The direction in which the pedestrian is facing is one of the most important cues predicting where the pedestrian may move in the future. So we first address the problem of single-frame pedestrian orientation estimation in real-world scenes. Then again, we estimate the pedestrian walking direction using multi-frame based on the result of single-frame orientation estimation. We propose a three-step method: pedestrian detection for single-frame step, orientation estimation for single-frame step and walking direction estimation for multi-frame step. To evaluate the proposed method in its robustness and accuracy, the experiments have been performed between numbers of images which is highly challenging uncontrolled conditions in real world. It shows a significant performance improvement in octant orientation estimation of about 64% accuracy in the orientation estimation step and achieved surprisingly good accuracy in estimating the walking direction against 212 targeted objects.