Agreeing to Cross: How Drivers and Pedestrians Communicate
This work addresses safety and interaction challenges for autonomous vehicles and urban planning by providing insights into human communication in traffic, though it is incremental as it builds on existing studies of pedestrian behavior.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding how drivers and pedestrians communicate during crossing events by introducing a novel dataset of over 650 pedestrian behavior samples and analyzing non-verbal cues like gaze and time to collision, finding that pedestrians gaze at approaching cars in over 90% of cases in non-signalized crosswalks.
The contribution of this paper is twofold. The first is a novel dataset for studying behaviors of traffic participants while crossing. Our dataset contains more than 650 samples of pedestrian behaviors in various street configurations and weather conditions. These examples were selected from approx. 240 hours of driving in the city, suburban and urban roads. The second contribution is an analysis of our data from the point of view of joint attention. We identify what types of non-verbal communication cues road users use at the point of crossing, their responses, and under what circumstances the crossing event takes place. It was found that in more than 90% of the cases pedestrians gaze at the approaching cars prior to crossing in non-signalized crosswalks. The crossing action, however, depends on additional factors such as time to collision (TTC), explicit driver's reaction or structure of the crosswalk.