Do They Want to Cross? Understanding Pedestrian Intention for Behavior Prediction

Driving in urban traffic requires making quick and safe decisions while interacting with multiple pedestrians and other road users. Early anticipation of others' intentions is especially important for predicting their future behavior. In this work, we explore the human ability to estimate intentions of pedestrians in typical urban traffic conditions. Towards this goal, we analyze the results of our large-scale experiment that involved over 700 subjects to establish a human reference point for the task of pedestrian intention estimation. We determine what visual features correlate with human decisions and the relative difficulty of scenarios and validate our conclusions using a linear logistic model. Furthermore, we propose two models to demonstrate the benefits of using intention for pedestrian trajectory and future crossing action prediction. Our experiments show that an improvement of up to 5 % can be achieved on both tasks.