Detection of pedestrians employing a wide-angel camera

Recently, the number of accidents that pedestrians have law violation is in the tendency of decrease in Japan. However, accidents caused by pedestrians crossing a crosswalk or dashing into a crosswalk still have high ratio, and both accident sources account for 15% of the whole number of accidents caused by a pedestrian. Although many researches in ITS in which pedestrians are detected from in-vehicle cameras have been actively done to solve these problems, they usually employ standard cameras, and those pedestrians who exist outside of the camera view cannot be detected. In this paper, we employ a wide-angle camera which has wider view than a general camera and propose a technique for detecting pedestrians from the wide-angle image. Since, in a wide-angle camera image, every object becomes smaller, we propose a technique for detecting pedestrians employing optical flows converging to a FOE (Focus of Expansion). Experimental results show satisfactory performance of the technique.