Instance Segmentation and Detection of Children to Safeguard Vulnerable Traffic User by Infrastructure

Cameras mounted on intelligent roadside infrastructure units and vehicles can detect humans on the road using state-of-the-art perception algorithms, but these algorithms are presently not trained to distinguish between human and adult. However, this is a crucial requirement from a safety perspective because a child may not follow all the traffic rules, particularly while crossing the road. Moreover, a child may stop or may start playing on the road. In such situations, the separation of a child from an adult is necessary. The work in this paper targets to solve this problem by applying a transfer-learning-based neural network approach to classify child and adult separately in camera images. The described work is comprised of image data collection, data annotation, transfer learning-based model development, and evaluation. For the work, Mask-RCNN (region-based convolutional neural network) with different backbone architectures and two different baselines are investigated and the perception precision of the architectures after transfer-learning is compared. The results reveal that the best performing trained model is able to detect and classify children and adults separately in different road scenarios with segmentation mask AP (average precision) of 85% and bounding box AP of 92%.