Mohammad Khoshkdahan

Mohammad Khoshkdahan, Alexey Vinel

Safe autonomous agents and mobile robots need fast real time 3D perception, especially for vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians. We introduce a new bird's eye view (BEV) encoding, which maps the full 3D LiDAR point cloud into a light-weight 2D BEV tensor with three height bands. We explicitly reformulate 3D detection as a 2D detection problem and then reconstruct 3D boxes from the BEV outputs. A single network detects cars, pedestrians, and cyclists in one pass. The backbone uses area attention at deep stages, a hierarchical bidirectional neck over P1 to P4 fuses context and detail, and the head predicts oriented boxes with distribution focal learning for side offsets and a rotated IoU loss. Training applies a small vertical re bin and a mild reflectance jitter in channel space to resist memorization. We use an interquartile range (IQR) filter to remove noisy and outlier LiDAR points during 3D reconstruction. On KITTI dataset, TriBand-BEV attains 58.7/52.6/47.2 pedestrian BEV AP(%) for easy, moderate, and hard at 49 FPS on a single consumer GPU, surpassing Complex-YOLO, with gains of +12.6%, +7.5%, and +3.1%. Qualitative scenes show stable detection under occlusion. The pipeline is compact and ready for real time robotic deployment. Our source code is publicly available on GitHub.

Mohammad Khoshkdahan, John Pravin Arockiasamy, Andy Flores Comeca et al.

Collisions at non-line-of-sight (NLOS) intersections remain a major safety concern because drivers have limited visibility of approaching traffic. V2X based warnings can reduce these risks, yet many vehicles are not equipped with V2X and drivers may ignore in vehicle alerts. Collective perception (CP) can compensate for low V2X penetration by extending the awareness of connected vehicles, but it cannot influence unconnected vehicles. To fill this gap, our work introduces a complementary concept that adds a cooperative humanoid robot as an active traffic moderator capable of physically stopping a vehicle that attempts to merge into an unseen traffic stream. The system operates on two parallel perception pathways. A dual camera infrastructure unit detects the position, speed and motion of approaching vehicles and transmits this information to the robot as a collective perception message (CPM). The robot also receives cooperative awareness messages (CAM) from connected vehicles through its onboard V2X unit and can act as a relay for decentralized environmental notification messages (DENM) when safety events originate elsewhere along the road. A fusion module combines these streams to maintain a robust real time view of the main road. A Zone of Danger (ZoD) is defined and used to predict whether an approaching vehicle creates a collision risk for a merging road user. When such a risk is detected, the robot issues a human-like STOP gesture and blocks the merging path until the hazard disappears. The full system was deployed at the Future Mobility Park (FMP) in Rotterdam. Experiments show that the combined vision and V2X perception allows the robot to detect approaching vehicles early, predict hazards reliably and prevent unsafe merges in real world NLOS conditions.

Mohammad Khoshkdahan, Arman Akbari, Arash Akbari et al.

Pedestrian detection plays a critical role in autonomous driving (AD), where ensuring safety and reliability is important. While many detection models aim to reduce miss-rates and handle challenges such as occlusion and long-range recognition, fairness remains an underexplored yet equally important concern. In this work, we systematically investigate how variations in the pedestrian pose -- including leg status, elbow status, and body orientation -- as well as individual joint occlusions, affect detection performance. We evaluate five pedestrian-specific detectors (F2DNet, MGAN, ALFNet, CSP, and Cascade R-CNN) alongside three general-purpose models (YOLOv12 variants) on the EuroCity Persons Dense Pose (ECP-DP) dataset. Fairness is quantified using the Equal Opportunity Difference (EOD) metric across various confidence thresholds. To assess statistical significance and robustness, we apply the Z-test. Our findings highlight biases against pedestrians with parallel legs, straight elbows, and lateral views. Occlusion of lower body joints has a more negative impact on the detection rate compared to the upper body and head. Cascade R-CNN achieves the lowest overall miss-rate and exhibits the smallest bias across all attributes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive pose- and occlusion-aware fairness evaluation in pedestrian detection for AD.