Pedestrian Detection Method using a Multilayer Laserscanner: Application in Urban Environment

Pedestrian safety is a primary traffic issue in urban environment. This article deals with the detection of pedestrians by means of a laser sensor. This sensor, placed on the front of a vehicle collects information about distance distributed according to 4 laser planes. Like a vehicle, a pedestrian constitutes in the vehicle environment an obstacle which must be detected, located, then identified and tracked if necessary. In order to improve the robustness of pedestrian detection using a single laser sensor we propose here a detection system based on the fusion of information located in the 4 laser planes. In this paper, we propose a Parzen kernel method that allows first to isolate the "pedestrian objects" in each plane and then to carry out a decentralized fusion according to the 4 laser planes. Finally, to improve our pedestrian detection algorithm we use a MCMC based PF method allowing a closer obervation of pedestrian random movement dynamics. Many experimental results validate and show the relevance of our pedestrian detection algorithm in regard to a method using only a single-row laser-range scanner.