Manuel Hetzel

Manuel Hetzel, Hannes Reichert, Günther Reitberger et al.

Inner-city intersections are among the most critical traffic areas for injury and fatal accidents. Automated vehicles struggle with the complex and hectic everyday life within those areas. Sensor-equipped smart infrastructures, which can cooperate with vehicles, can benefit automated traffic by extending the perception capabilities of drivers and vehicle perception systems. Additionally, they offer the opportunity to gather reproducible and precise data of a holistic scene understanding, including context information as a basis for training algorithms for various applications in automated traffic. Therefore, we introduce the Infrastructural Multi-Person Trajectory and Context Dataset (IMPTC). We use an intelligent public inner-city intersection in Germany with visual sensor technology. A multi-view camera and LiDAR system perceives traffic situations and road users' behavior. Additional sensors monitor contextual information like weather, lighting, and traffic light signal status. The data acquisition system focuses on Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) and multi-agent interaction. The resulting dataset consists of eight hours of measurement data. It contains over 2,500 VRU trajectories, including pedestrians, cyclists, e-scooter riders, strollers, and wheelchair users, and over 20,000 vehicle trajectories at different day times, weather conditions, and seasons. In addition, to enable the entire stack of research capabilities, the dataset includes all data, starting from the sensor-, calibration- and detection data until trajectory and context data. The dataset is continuously expanded and is available online for non-commercial research at https://github.com/kav-institute/imptc-dataset.

Hannes Reichert, Manuel Hetzel, Steven Schreck et al.

In this work, we propose an extension of conventional image data by an additional channel in which the associated projection properties are encoded. This addresses the issue of sensor-dependent object representation in projection-based sensors, such as LiDAR, which can lead to distorted physical and geometric properties due to variations in sensor resolution and field of view. To that end, we propose an architecture for processing this data in an instance segmentation framework. We focus specifically on LiDAR as a key sensor modality for machine vision tasks and highly automated driving (HAD). Through an experimental setup in a controlled synthetic environment, we identify a bias on sensor resolution and field of view and demonstrate that our proposed method can reduce said bias for the task of LiDAR instance segmentation. Furthermore, we define our method such that it can be applied to other projection-based sensors, such as cameras. To promote transparency, we make our code and dataset publicly available. This method shows the potential to improve performance and robustness in various machine vision tasks that utilize projection-based sensors.

Manuel Hetzel, Hannes Reichert, Konrad Doll et al.

Complex inner-city junctions are among the most critical traffic areas for injury and fatal accidents. The development of highly automated driving (HAD) systems struggles with the complex and hectic everyday life within those areas. Sensor-equipped smart infrastructures, which can communicate and cooperate with vehicles, are essential to enable a holistic scene understanding to resolve occlusions drivers and vehicle perception systems for themselves can not cover. We introduce an intelligent research infrastructure equipped with visual sensor technology, located at a public inner-city junction in Aschaffenburg, Germany. A multiple-view camera system monitors the traffic situation to perceive road users' behavior. Both motorized and non-motorized traffic is considered. The system is used for research in data generation, evaluating new HAD sensors systems, algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) training strategies using real-, synthetic- and augmented data. In addition, the junction features a highly accurate digital twin. Real-world data can be taken into the digital twin for simulation purposes and synthetic data generation.

Manuel Hetzel, Kerim Turacan, Hannes Reichert et al.

Human Trajectory Forecasting (HTF) predicts future human movements from past trajectories and environmental context, with applications in Autonomous Driving, Smart Surveillance, and Human-Robot Interaction. While prior work has focused on accuracy, social interaction modeling, and diversity, little attention has been paid to uncertainty modeling, calibration, and forecasts from short observation periods, which are crucial for downstream tasks such as path planning and collision avoidance. We propose DD-MDN, an end-to-end probabilistic HTF model that combines high positional accuracy, calibrated uncertainty, and robustness to short observations. Using a few-shot denoising diffusion backbone and a dual mixture density network, our method learns self-calibrated residence areas and probability-ranked anchor paths, from which diverse trajectory hypotheses are derived, without predefined anchors or endpoints. Experiments on the ETH/UCY, SDD, inD, and IMPTC datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy, robustness at short observation intervals, and reliable uncertainty modeling. The code is available at: https://github.com/kav-institute/ddmdn.