Camera based pedestrian path prediction by means of polynomial least-squares approximation and multilayer perceptron neural networks

This paper provides a method to forecast pedestrian trajectories by means of polynomial least-squares approximation and multilayer perceptron artificial neural networks for traffic safety applications. The approach uses camera based head tracking as input data to predict a continuous trajectory for a 2.5 s future time horizon. Training and test is performed using 1075 recorded tracks of uninstructed pedestrians in common public traffic situations, including many challenging scenarios like starting, stopping and bending in. The neural network approach has the ability to handle these scenes by learning a single implicit movement model independent of a specific motion type. The polynomial approximation provides an extraction of the principal information of the underlying time series in the form of the polynomial coefficients, high independence of input data, e.g., sample rate, and additional noise resistance. Our test results show 24% lower prediction errors for starting scenes and 29% for stopping scenes in comparison to a constant velocity Kalman filter. Approaches using MLP without polynomial input and the usage of Support Vector Regression (SVR) as motion predictor are also outperformed.