Assistive Pedestrian Crossings by Means of Stereo Localization and RFID Anonymous Disability Identification

Assistive technology usually refers to systems used to increase, maintain, or improve functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities. This idea is here extended to transportation infrastructures, using pedestrian crossings as a specific case study. We define an Assistive Pedestrian Crossing as a pedestrian crossing able to interact with users with disabilities and provide an adaptive response to increase, maintain or improve their functional capabilities while crossing. Thus, the infrastructure should be able to locate the pedestrians with special needs as well as to identify their specific disability. In this paper, user location is obtained by means of a stereo-based pedestrian detection system. Disability identification is proposed by means of a RFID-based anonymous procedure from which pedestrians are only required to wear a portable and passive RFID tag. Global nearest neighbor is applied to solve data association between stereo targets and RFID measurements. The proposed assistive technology is validated in a real crosswalk, including different complex scenarios with multiple RFID tags.