Agreeing to Cross: How Drivers and Pedestrians Communicate

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new dataset of pedestrian crossing behaviors and analyzes non-verbal communication cues between drivers and pedestrians, revealing key factors influencing crossing decisions.

Contribution

It provides a novel dataset of pedestrian behaviors and offers an analysis of non-verbal cues and their role in crossing decisions from a joint attention perspective.

Findings

Over 90% of pedestrians gaze at approaching cars before crossing.

Crossing depends on factors like time to collision and driver reactions.

Dataset includes 650+ samples from 240 hours of varied driving conditions.

Abstract

The contribution of this paper is twofold. The first is a novel dataset for studying behaviors of traffic participants while crossing. Our dataset contains more than 650 samples of pedestrian behaviors in various street configurations and weather conditions. These examples were selected from approx. 240 hours of driving in the city, suburban and urban roads. The second contribution is an analysis of our data from the point of view of joint attention. We identify what types of non-verbal communication cues road users use at the point of crossing, their responses, and under what circumstances the crossing event takes place. It was found that in more than 90% of the cases pedestrians gaze at the approaching cars prior to crossing in non-signalized crosswalks. The crossing action, however, depends on additional factors such as time to collision (TTC), explicit driver's reaction or structure of the crosswalk.