Video-Based Monitoring of Pedestrian Movements at Signalized Intersections

Pedestrian and cyclist crossing characteristics are important for the design of urban intersections and signalized crossings. Parameters, such as waiting time, crossing time, and arrival rate are key variables for describing pedestrian characteristics and improving crossing design and signal timing plan. Manually collecting such data is often extremely labor intensive. Therefore, we introduce an automated computer-vision based approach for collecting these parameters in real-time using ordinary video cameras. Broadly defined pedestrian objects including bicyclists and boarders are extracted via the background subtraction technique and tracked through an inherent cost characteristic function in conjunction with an α –β filter. The waiting zone concept introduced in this paper helps provide robust pedestrian tracking initialization and parameter extraction. The proposed approach is implemented in a Pedestrian Tracking (PedTrack) system using Microsoft Visual C#. Tested with real video data from three study sites, this system was proven to be effective and about 80% of pedestrian crossing events were successfully detected. PedTrack shows a potential to be a great data collection tool for non-motorized object movements at intersections. Malinovskiy, Wu, Wang 3