Pedestrian Safety by Intent Prediction: A Lightweight LSTM-Attention Architecture and Experimental Evaluations with Real-World Datasets

Autonomous vehicles face significant challenges in understanding pedestrian behavior, particularly in urban environments. In such settings, the system must recognize pedestrian intentions and anticipate their actions to achieve safe and intelligent driving. This paper focuses on predicting pedestrian crossings, enabling oncoming vehicles to react to pedestrians in a traffic scene in a timely manner. We investigate the effectiveness of various input features for pedestrian crossing prediction, including human poses, bounding boxes, and ego vehicle speed features. We propose a novel lightweight architecture based on LSTM and attention to accurately identify crossing pedestrians. Our methods are evaluated on two widely used public datasets for pedestrian behavior, PIE and JAAD datasets, and our algorithm achieves a state-of-the-art performance in both datasets by reaching a prediction accuracy of 91% and an F1-score of 84% on the PIE dataset and an accuracy of 67% and an F1-score of 77% on the JAAD Behavior (BEH) split. We make our code available at https://github.com/afnan29alofi/Pedestrian-Intent-Prediction.git