Analyzing vehicle-pedestrian interactions: Combining data cube structure and predictive collision risk estimation model

Abstract

Road traffic accidents are a severe threat to human lives, particularly to vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians causing premature deaths. Therefore, it is necessary to devise systems to prevent accidents in advance and respond proactively, using potential risky situations as one of the surrogate safety measurements. This study introduces a new concept of a pedestrian safety system that combines the field and the centralized processes. The system can warn of upcoming risks immediately in the field and improve the safety of risk-frequent areas by assessing the safety levels of roads without actual collisions. In particular, this study focuses on the latter by introducing a new analytical framework for a crosswalk safety assessment with various behaviors of vehicles/pedestrians and environmental features. We obtain these behavioral features from actual traffic video footages in the city with complete automatic processing. The proposed framework mainly analyzes these behaviors in multi-dimensional perspectives by constructing a data cube structure, which combines the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based predictive collision risk (PCR) estimation model and the on-line analytical processing (OLAP) operations. From the PCR estimation model, we categorize the severity of risks as four levels; "relatively safe," "caution," "warning," and "danger," and apply the proposed framework to assess the crosswalk safety with behavioral features. With the proposed framework, the various descriptive results are harvested, but we aim at conducting analysis based on two scenarios in our analytic experiments; the movement patterns of vehicles and pedestrians by road environment and the relationships between risk levels and car speeds. Consequently, the proposed framework can support decision-makers (e.g., urban planners, safety administrators) by providing the valuable information to improve pedestrian safety for future accidents, and it can help us better understand cars' and pedestrians' proactive behavior near the crosswalks. In order to confirm the feasibility and applicability of the proposed framework, we implement and apply it to actual operating CCTVs in Osan City, Republic of Korea.

Keywords: Data cube model; Multi-dimensional analysis; Pedestrian safety; Predictive collision risk; Trajectory prediction.