Vision-based monitoring of pedestrian crossings

This paper presents a vision-based intelligent pedestrian crossing able to derive information on the occupancy status of its zebra crossing. The detection of pedestrians can help enhancing safety for road users who need longer to cross the road. At the same time, it produces savings in traffic delay. A stereo vision approach is adopted: the difference between two bird's eye views of the crossing is analyzed to extract objects rising up from the road plane. Background subtraction is applied to get rid of noise due to small drifts in the calibration and lens distortion. The discrimination between pedestrians and vehicles is performed taking into account their direction of movement.