Video Processing for Detection and Tracking of Pedestrians and Vehicles at Zebra Crossings

This paper describes results of experiments with camera setup, calibration and image processing algorithms for automatic detection and tracking of pedestrians and vehicles. The aim of the MOBIS project was to develop a method of assessing safety of unsignalised pedestrian crossings. Correct detection and tracking proved to be more difficult in the case of pedestrians than vehicles due to variability in people’s appearance, movement in groups and poor visibility in bad weather. Application of cameras with built-in pedestrian tracking programs was successful only in very good visibility conditions, so a computationally efficient PC algorithm providing a high pedestrian detection rate was used instead. The paper presents comparison of results obtained using different image processing methods as well as selected problems of pedestrian tracking. Statistical analysis of pedestrian behaviour with and without vehicles present is also shown. The proposed approach seems to be accurate enough for the purpose of assessing pedestrian safety.