Detection of pedestrian crossing using bipolarity feature-an image-based technique

This paper presents a novel approach for detecting pedestrian crossings to enhance the safety and mobility of blind people while crossing a road. It is extremely important for a blind person to know whether a frontal area is a crossing or not. In a crossing, the usual black road surface is painted with constant-width periodic white bands. An image-based technique has been developed to detect the bipolar patterns of pedestrian crossings. The presence of pedestrian crossings are inferred by careful analysis of crossing width, crossing direction, number of crossing bands, as well as bandwidth trend. Experimental evaluation of the proposed approach was conducted using 100 real images with and without crossings. It was found that the proposed technique performed with 95% accuracy and with no false positive.