Vehicle and pedestrian collision prevention system based on smart video surveillance and C2I communication

Hundreds of thousands of pedestrians are involved in severe traffic accidents every year world-wide. Reasons for these accidents include complex and highly dynamic traffic situations where views are obstructed or unexpected movement occurs. Driver assistance systems are a valid option for increasing pedestrian safety by enhancing the awareness of complex traffic situations and identifying potential dangers. In this work, we present a collision avoidance system based on smart video surveillance and car-to-infrastructure communication. We use a distributed system of monocular cameras to determine the position of both vehicles and pedestrians in realtime. In addition, we utilize standard car-2-x communication technology (ETSI ITS G5) to provide all position detections to the vehicles, thus enabling complex use cases such as warning cascades to drivers in case of oncoming dangers. A detailed evaluation of the proposed system and collision warning use case demonstrates the suitability as assistance system for human drivers. We also show that automatic braking systems would lead to drastic performance improvements due to a significant reduction of reaction times.