Monocular Pedestrian Orientation Estimation Based on Deep 2D-3D Feedforward
This addresses safety in autonomous driving by improving pedestrian intention prediction, though it is an incremental advance in monocular methods.
The paper tackles pedestrian orientation estimation for autonomous driving by proposing FFNet, a monocular model that incorporates 2D and 3D dimensions as inputs via feedforward links, resulting in at least a 1.72% AOS increase over state-of-the-art models.
Accurate pedestrian orientation estimation of autonomous driving helps the ego vehicle obtain the intentions of pedestrians in the related environment, which are the base of safety measures such as collision avoidance and prewarning. However, because of relatively small sizes and high-level deformation of pedestrians, common pedestrian orientation estimation models fail to extract sufficient and comprehensive information from them, thus having their performance restricted, especially monocular ones which fail to obtain depth information of objects and related environment. In this paper, a novel monocular pedestrian orientation estimation model, called FFNet, is proposed. Apart from camera captures, the model adds the 2D and 3D dimensions of pedestrians as two other inputs according to the logic relationship between orientation and them. The 2D and 3D dimensions of pedestrians are determined from the camera captures and further utilized through two feedforward links connected to the orientation estimator. The feedforward links strengthen the logicality and interpretability of the network structure of the proposed model. Experiments show that the proposed model has at least 1.72% AOS increase than most state-of-the-art models after identical training processes. The model also has competitive results in orientation estimation evaluation on KITTI dataset.