Almost all locomotor animals respond to visual looming or to discrete changes in optical size. The need to detect and process looming remains critically important for humans in everyday life. Road traffic statistics confirm that children up to 15 years old are overrepresented in pedestrian casualties. We demonstrate that, for a given pedestrian crossing time, vehicles traveling faster loom less...

Pedestrians are the most vulnerable road users. For evaluating and modifying pedestrian safety in unsignalized crosswalks,the first important issue is to identify and explore factors affecting the interaction behavior of pedestrians andvehicles in conflict areas. By analyzing those factors and determining how they affect road user's behavior, we canrepresent the plans and proc...

Crowds are a quite usual experience in everyday life. They are mostly safe but, in some cases, can be dangerous. Understanding competitive egress behaviours can be helpful in avoiding tragic events: effective egress models are useful both in designing large venues and in calculating their working conditions during emergencies. The simulation of pedestrian motions within an area in the presence ...

PROBLEM Every year numerous occupational fatalities result from pedestrians being struck by motor vehicles intruding into work zones. METHOD Attributes of retroreflective personal safety garments on pedestrian conspicuity at night were assessed in a field study. Using instrumented vehicles on a closed track, participants drove through simulated work zones attempting to detect pedestrians loca...

Pedestrian detection has been an active area of research in recent years; its interest relies on the potential positive impact on quality of life of the related applications (surveillance systems, automotive safety, robotics, multimedia content analysis, assistive technology and advanced interactive interfaces, among others). The large variability of human appearances, poses and context conditi...

The re-discovery of the urban environment as an important component of daily life induced an increased interest in methods for assessing the quality of open spaces with respect to their contribution to the quality of urban life. A wide range of studies ranging from field experiments up to the application of numerical models have been conducted in order to understand and predict the interactions...

Sense of security is one of the basic human needs and the most influential social components of urban life. Perhaps it can be the most important factor in promoting or hindering walking in cities. In other words, if the neighborhoods of a city have a good level of security, the presents of pedestrians can be seen in local streets even in the late night hours. In this regard and to the answer to...

Walking, as an important transportation mode, plays a large part in urban transportation systems. This mode is of great importance for planners and decision-makers because of its impact on environmental and health aspects of communities. However, this mode is so complex in nature that makes it difficult to study or model. On the other hand, chaos theory studies complex dynamical nonlinear syste...