P-LPN: Towards Real Time Pedestrian Location Perception in Complex Driving Scenes

Semantic segmentation is one of the most critical modules in road scene understanding. In this paper, we focus on the challenging task of pedestrian’s relative location perception in the semantic graph of complex driving scenes. Prevalent research on semantic segmentation mainly concentrate on improving the segmentation accuracy with less attention paid to computational efficiency. Furthermore, little effort has been made in pedestrian location perception in complex driving scenes. For example, current semantic segmentation methods classify all pedestrians as a mono category, regardless of whether the pedestrians are penetrating into the vehicular lane or standing still in the safe sidewalk area. We propose a pedestrian location perception network (P-LPN). P-LPN can produce real-time semantic segmentation while simultaneously providing location inference for each pedestrian in semantic maps. This enables autonomous driving system to categorize pedestrians into different safety levels. We comprehensively evaluated P-LPN on CityScapes benchmark through comparative studies. Our proposal achieved competitive performance in both accuracy and efficiency. It yields quality inference with real-time speed at ~22 fps.