Pedestrian Movement Recognition for Radio Based Collision Avoidance: A Performance Analysis

In today´s increasingly mobile society, car manufacturers and suppliers worldwide face the imperative requirement and have already been working to reduce the number of people killed in traffic accidents. In this context pedestrian protection respectively collision avoidance between cars and pedestrians is of vital importance. Several approaches exist to detect pedestrians but only a few of them are able to work without line of sight and/ or only have a very brief view of the movement history of the pedestrian. However, radio communication based systems which exchange GPS based position information of the pedestrian and the car might have a detailed view to the movement history but the update frequency of GPS positions provided by the mobile phone reduces the speed of the system and might induce false alarms. In this paper, the additional use of pedestrian movement recognition using an acceleration sensor implemented in a mobile phone in the area of collision avoidance between cars and pedestrian is presented and a performance analysis is carried out using the results of an experiment. Finally, the benefits of this approach to the reduction of false alarms and detection of endangered pedestrians are discussed.