Localization and analysis of critical areas in urban scenarios

This paper presents an application of a pedestrian detection system aimed at localizing potentially dangerous situations in specific urban scenarios. The approach used in this work differs from the one implemented in traditional pedestrian detection systems, which are designed to localize all pedestrians appearing in the area in front of the vehicle. This application first locates critical areas in the urban environment, and then it searches for pedestrians in these areas only. The environment is reconstructed with a standard laser scanner system, while the following check for the presence of pedestrians is performed thanks to the fusion with a vision system. The great advantages of such an approach are that pedestrian recognition is performed on a very limited image area -therefore boosting its timing performance- and no assessment on the danger level is finally required before providing the result to either the driver or an on-board computer for automatic manoeuvres.