Leveraging Structure from Motion to Localize Inaccessible Bus Stops

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach using Structure from Motion (SfM) and segmentation to detect snow-covered sidewalks along bus routes, addressing the challenge of localizing obscured areas without extensive annotated data.

Contribution

The method leverages SfM with minimal annotated data to localize important areas and detect obstructions like snow, improving hazard detection in smart city transit systems.

Findings

Effective localization of sidewalks using SfM and segmentation.

Accurate detection of snow coverage on sidewalks.

Method generalizes to other hazardous conditions.

Abstract

The detection of hazardous conditions near public transit stations is necessary for ensuring the safety and accessibility of public transit. Smart city infrastructures aim to facilitate this task among many others through the use of computer vision. However, most state-of-the-art computer vision models require thousands of images in order to perform accurate detection, and there exist few images of hazardous conditions as they are generally rare. In this paper, we examine the detection of snow-covered sidewalks along bus routes. Previous work has focused on detecting other vehicles in heavy snowfall or simply detecting the presence of snow. However, our application has an added complication of determining if the snow covers areas of importance and can cause falls or other accidents (e.g. snow covering a sidewalk) or simply covers some background area (e.g. snow on a neighboring field). This problem involves localizing the positions of the areas of importance when they are not necessarily visible. We introduce a method that utilizes Structure from Motion (SfM) rather than additional annotated data to address this issue. Specifically, our method learns the locations of sidewalks in a given scene by applying a segmentation model and SfM to images from bus cameras during clear weather. Then, we use the learned locations to detect if and where the sidewalks become obscured with snow. After evaluating across various threshold parameters, we identify an optimal range at which our method consistently classifies different categories of sidewalk images correctly. Although we demonstrate an application for snow coverage along bus routes, this method can extend to other hazardous conditions as well. Code for this project is available at https://github.com/ind1010/SfM_for_BusEdge.