Pedestrian Archetypes Extension -- More Pedestrian Models for Autonomous Vehicle Safety Testing
For developers of autonomous vehicle safety systems, this incremental extension provides a more comprehensive set of pedestrian behavior models, but no quantitative evaluation or performance improvement is reported.
This work extends a prior taxonomy of pedestrian archetypes for autonomous vehicle safety testing by identifying 7 new archetypes from YouTube dash-cam videos, capturing behavioral patterns not covered by the original 12 archetypes.
In our prior work, Pedestrian Archetypes, we defined pedestrian archetypes as collections of behaviors that uniquely identify a specific type of pedestrian. The first paper proposed 12 pedestrian archetypes, including the Wanderer, Drunk, Distracted, Flash, Indecisive, Blind, Flock, Jaywalker, Elderly, Kid, Eventful, and Parked Pedestrian. These archetypes were introduced to move beyond single behavior labels and provide a more natural way to describe how dangerous pedestrians actually behave progressively in real-world traffic scenarios. However, upon further annotation of YouTube dash-cam videos, we identified 7 additional pedestrian archetypes with observable and significant behavioral differences from the previously proposed ones. These new archetypes capture pedestrian behavior patterns that could not be fully explained by the original taxonomy. In this pre-print, we introduce each new archetype, define its essential and optional behaviors, explain how it differs from previously proposed archetypes, and provide video-frame evidence showing the archetype in action.