Pedestrian and Cyclist Detection and Intent Estimation for Autonomous Vehicles: A Survey

As autonomous vehicles become more common on the roads, their advancement draws on safety concerns for vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists. This paper presents a review of recent developments in pedestrian and cyclist detection and intent estimation to increase the safety of autonomous vehicles, for both the driver and other road users. Understanding the intentions of the pedestrian/cyclist enables the self-driving vehicle to take actions to avoid incidents. To make this possible, development of methods/techniques, such as deep learning (DL), for the autonomous vehicle will be explored. For example, the development of pedestrian detection has been significantly advanced using DL approaches, such as; Fast Region-Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) , Faster R-CNN and Single Shot Detector (SSD). Although DL has been around for several decades, the hardware to realise the techniques have only recently become viable. Using these DL methods for pedestrian and cyclist detection and applying it for the tracking, motion modelling and pose estimation can allow for a successful and accurate method of intent estimation for the vulnerable road users. Although there has been a growth in research surrounding the study of pedestrian detection using vision-based approaches, further attention should include focus on cyclist detection. To further improve safety for these vulnerable road users (VRUs), approaches such as sensor fusion and intent estimation should be investigated.