We present intrApose, a novel method for continuous 6 DOF head pose estimation from a single camera image without prior detection or landmark localization. We argue that using camera intrinsics alongside the intensity information is essential for accurate pose estimation. The proposed head pose estimation framework is crop-aware and scale-aware, i.e., it keeps poses estimated within image cut-outs consistent with the whole image. It employs a continuous, differentiable rotation representation that simplifies the overall architecture compared to existing methods. Our method is validated on DD-Pose, a challenging real-world in-vehicle driver observation dataset that offers a broad spectrum of poses and occlusion states from naturalistic driving scenarios. In ablation studies we compare rotation and translation errors of intrinsics-aware and-agnostic methods, continuous and discontinuous rotation representations, and data sampling strategies. Experiments show that leveraging camera intrinsics and a continuous rotation representation (SVDO+) results in a balanced mean angular error (BMAE) of 5.8° compared to the intrinsics agnostic baseline with a discontinuous rotation representation (14.8°). Furthermore, training with an unbiased data distribution (most driver measurements are close-to-frontal) improved BMAE on the hard subset (extreme orientations and occlusions) from 15.3° to 9.5°.

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This thesis addresses the sensor-based perception of driver and pedestrian to improve joint path prediction of ego-vehicle and pedestrian based on mutual awareness in the domain of intelligent vehicles. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than half of global traffic deaths are among Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs), such as pedestrians and riders, and human error is still a major cause of accidents. This motivates paying special attention to pedestrians and drivers while they are interacting in traffic. For the foreseeable future, the reality on the road (and the accident numbers) will largely be determined by Advanced Driver-assistance Systems (ADAS) where the driver is still required to keep the eyes on the road. To that end, the scope of this thesis resides within ADAS and driving automation up to (including) autonomy level 3 as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). While current ADAS consider pedestrians and the driver individually, their mutual awareness has not been leveraged to improve path prediction and thereby road safety. This thesis presents a framework that estimates driver head pose from driver camera images, estimates pedestrian location and orientation from exterior camera images and lidar point clouds, uses this information over time to reason about driver and pedestrian mutual awareness, and performs joint probabilistic path prediction of ego-vehicle and pedestrian to assess collision risk. Deep neural networks demand a large training set to tune the vast amount of parameters. This thesis introduces DD-Pose, the Daimler TU Delft Driver Head Pose Benchmark, a large-scale and diverse benchmark for image-based head pose estimation and driver analysis. It contains 330k measurements from multiple cameras acquired by an in-car setup during naturalistic drives. Large out-of-plane head rotations and occlusions are induced by complex driving scenarios. Precise head pose annotations are obtained by a motion capture sensor and a novel calibration device. The new dataset offers a broad distribution of head poses, comprising an order of magnitude more samples of rare poses than a comparable dataset. Utilizing the dataset, this thesis presents intrApose, a novel method for continuous 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) head pose estimation from a single camera image without prior detection or landmark localization. intrApose uses camera intrinsics consistently within the deep neural network and is crop-aware and scale-aware: poses estimated from bounding boxes within the overall image are converted to a consistent pose within the camera frame. It employs a continuous, differentiable rotation representation that simplifies the overall architecture compared to existing methods. Experiments show that leveraging camera intrinsics and a continuous rotation representation (SVDO+) results in improved pose estimation compared to intrinsics agnostic variants and variants with discontinuous rotation representations. Driver head pose of naturalistic driving is biased towards close-to-frontal orientations. Training with an unbiased data distribution, i.e., a more uniform distribution of head poses, further reduces rotation error, specifically for extreme orientations and occlusions. In addition to considering the inside of the vehicle, this thesis also focuses on the outside environment and presents a method for 3D person detection from a pair of camera image and lidar point cloud in automotive scenes. The method comprises a deep neural network that estimates the 3D location, spatial extent, and yaw orientation of persons present in the scene. 3D anchor proposals are refined in two stages: a region proposal network and a subsequent detection network. For both input modalities high-level feature representations are learned from raw sensor data instead of being manually designed. To that end, the method uses Voxel Feature Encoders to obtain point cloud features instead of widely used projection-based point cloud representations. Experiments are conducted on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark, a commonly used dataset in the automotive domain. Eventually, the output provided by the methods of the former chapters, namely, driver head pose and 3D person locations, are leveraged by a novel method for vehicle-pedestrian path prediction that takes into account the awareness of the driver and the pedestrian of each other’s presence. The method jointly models the paths of ego-vehicle and a pedestrian within a single Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN). In this DBN, subgraphs model the environment and entity-specific context cues of the vehicle and pedestrian (incl. awareness), which affect their future motion. These sub-graphs share a latent state which models whether the vehicle and pedestrian are on collision course. The method is validated with real-world data obtained by on-board vehicle sensing, spanning various awareness conditions and dynamic characteristics of the participants. Results show that at a prediction horizon of 1.5 s, context-aware models outperform context-agnostic models in path prediction for scenarios with a dynamics change while performing similarly otherwise. Results further indicate that driver attention-aware models improve collision risk estimation compared to driver-agnostic models. This illustrates that driver contextual cues can support a more anticipatory collision warning and vehicle control strategy. The main conclusions and findings of this thesis are: using a measurement device with a per-subject calibration procedure simplifies the data acquisition process to obtain a broad distribution of head poses. Using an intrinsics-aware head pose estimation method with a continuous rotation representations allows for a simple architecture that yields robust head pose estimates across a broad spectrum of head poses. Modeling of both driver and pedestrian mutual awareness in a unified DBN improves joint probabilistic path prediction compared to driver-agnostic models. Additionally, it provides explainability for model parameters and interpretability of the internal decision making process. Further research can be conducted to understand the behavior of humans inside and outside an intelligent vehicle. Two major trends go towards integrating uncertainties into the components and combining them to a system that can be trained end-to-end from raw sensor data to predicted paths. Future work would greatly benefit from representative, worldwide, naturalistic, multi-sensor, temporal data which cover the outside environment as well as the inside of the vehicle - ideally shared across research institutions and companies.@en

We present a novel method for vehicle-pedestrian path prediction that takes into account the awareness of the driver and the pedestrian towards each other. The method jointly models the paths of vehicle and pedestrian within a single Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN). In this DBN, sub-graphs model the environment and entity-specific context cues of the vehicle and pedestrian (incl. awareness), which affect their future motion and allow to increase the prediction horizon. These sub-graphs share a latent state which models whether vehicle and pedestrian are on collision course; this accounts for a certain degree of motion coupling. The method was validated with real-world data obtained by onboard vehicle sensing (stereo vision, GNSS and proprioceptive). Data consist of 93 vehicle and pedestrian encounters, spanning various awareness conditions and dynamic characteristics of the participants. In ablation studies, we quantify the benefits of various components of our proposed DBN model for path prediction and collision risk estimation. Results show that at a prediction horizon of 1.5 s, context aware models outperform context-agnostic models in path prediction for scenarios with a dynamics change, while performing similarly otherwise. Results further indicate that driver attention aware models improve collision risk estimation compared to driver-agnostic models.

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We present a method for 3D person detection from camera images and lidar point clouds in automotive scenes. The method comprises a deep neural network which estimates the 3D location and extent of persons present in the scene. 3D anchor proposals are refined in two stages: a region proposal network and a subsequent detection network.For both input modalities high-level feature representations are learned from raw sensor data instead of being manually designed. To that end, we use Voxel Feature Encoders [1] to obtain point cloud features instead of widely used projection-based point cloud representations, thus allowing the network to learn to predict the location and extent of persons in an end-to-end manner.Experiments on the validation set of the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark [2] show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with an average precision (AP) of 47.06% on moderate difficulty.@en

We introduce DD-Pose, the Daimler TU Delft Driver Head Pose Benchmark, a large-scale and diverse benchmark for image-based head pose estimation and driver analysis. It contains 330k measurements from multiple cameras acquired by an in-car setup during naturalistic drives. Large out-of-plane head rotations and occlusions are induced by complex driving scenarios, such as parking and driver-pedestrian interactions. Precise head pose annotations are obtained by a motion capture sensor and a novel calibration device. A high resolution stereo driver camera is supplemented by a camera capturing the driver cabin. Together with steering wheel and vehicle motion information, DD-Pose paves the way for holistic driver analysis. Our experiments show that the new dataset offers a broad distribution of head poses, comprising an order of magnitude more samples of rare poses than a comparable dataset. By an analysis of a state-of-the-art head pose estimation method, we demonstrate the challenges offered by the benchmark. The dataset and evaluation code are made freely available to academic and non-profit institutions for non-commercial benchmarking purposes.@en