Leveraging Structure from Motion to Localize Inaccessible Bus Stops
This addresses safety and accessibility issues for public transit users by detecting hazardous conditions like snow-covered sidewalks, though it is an incremental improvement applying existing techniques to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting hazardous snow-covered sidewalks near bus stops using computer vision, achieving consistent correct classification across different sidewalk image categories by identifying an optimal parameter range. They introduce a method that uses Structure from Motion (SfM) to learn sidewalk locations from clear-weather bus camera images and detect when they become obscured by snow.
The detection of hazardous conditions near public transit stations is necessary for ensuring the safety and accessibility of public transit. Smart city infrastructures aim to facilitate this task among many others through the use of computer vision. However, most state-of-the-art computer vision models require thousands of images in order to perform accurate detection, and there exist few images of hazardous conditions as they are generally rare. In this paper, we examine the detection of snow-covered sidewalks along bus routes. Previous work has focused on detecting other vehicles in heavy snowfall or simply detecting the presence of snow. However, our application has an added complication of determining if the snow covers areas of importance and can cause falls or other accidents (e.g. snow covering a sidewalk) or simply covers some background area (e.g. snow on a neighboring field). This problem involves localizing the positions of the areas of importance when they are not necessarily visible. We introduce a method that utilizes Structure from Motion (SfM) rather than additional annotated data to address this issue. Specifically, our method learns the locations of sidewalks in a given scene by applying a segmentation model and SfM to images from bus cameras during clear weather. Then, we use the learned locations to detect if and where the sidewalks become obscured with snow. After evaluating across various threshold parameters, we identify an optimal range at which our method consistently classifies different categories of sidewalk images correctly. Although we demonstrate an application for snow coverage along bus routes, this method can extend to other hazardous conditions as well. Code for this project is available at https://github.com/ind1010/SfM_for_BusEdge.