Cooperative Tracking of Cyclists Based on Smart Devices and Infrastructure
This work addresses safety for vulnerable road users like cyclists in future interconnected traffic, but it is incremental as it builds on existing tracking methods by integrating multiple data sources.
The paper tackles the problem of tracking cyclists in traffic by combining data from a stereo camera system and smart devices, showing that cooperative tracking improves tracking ability and accuracy, especially during occlusions, with numerical evaluations on starting and turning scenarios.
In future traffic scenarios, vehicles and other traffic participants will be interconnected and equipped with various types of sensors, allowing for cooperation based on data or information exchange. This article presents an approach to cooperative tracking of cyclists using smart devices and infrastructure-based sensors. A smart device is carried by the cyclists and an intersection is equipped with a wide angle stereo camera system. Two tracking models are presented and compared. The first model is based on the stereo camera system detections only, whereas the second model cooperatively combines the camera based detections with velocity and yaw rate data provided by the smart device. Our aim is to overcome limitations of tracking approaches based on single data sources. We show in numerical evaluations on scenes where cyclists are starting or turning right that the cooperation leads to an improvement in both the ability to keep track of a cyclist and the accuracy of the track particularly when it comes to occlusions in the visual system. We, therefore, contribute to the safety of vulnerable road users in future traffic.