Thesis: Crosswalk detection – Karatzaferis

  • Intro
  • Technical Aspects

Information

Primary software used Jupyter Notebook
Course Thesis: Crosswalk detection – Karatzaferis
Primary subject AI & ML
Secondary subject Machine Learning
Level Advanced
Last updated November 27, 2024
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Thesis: Crosswalk detection – Karatzaferis 0/1

Thesis: Crosswalk detection – Karatzaferis link copied

Crosswalk detection for the outdoor navigation of people with visual impairment by Odyssefs Karatzaferis

The aim of this study is to utilise freely available aerial imagery and spatial data to identify the location of pedestrian zebra crosswalk in an area. This will ultimately allow improved, independent navigation for people who are visually impaired by helping to adjust a route to consider crosswalk locations and ensure that everyone can walk across roads more safely. The main steps towards building the proposed system include:

Thesis Figure 20. Predictions camparison between the origional (left) and the fine-tuned (right) models
Thesis Figure 20. Predictions camparison between the origional (left) and the fine-tuned (right) models (Image copyright remains with paper author(s). Used with permission.)
  • Collecting training imagery dataset
  • Choosing an appropriate algorithm
  • Image quality control, grouping and labelling the images
  • Implementing and training the CNN model
  • Evaluating initial results
  • Data augmentation
  • Model fine-tuning
  • Applying the trained model to crosswalk detection in Delft
  • Testing model with different spatial resolution imagery

Here you can find the document of the full master thesis ‘Crosswalk detection for the outdoor navigation of people with visual impairment’.

Project Information

Author(s): Odyssefs Karatzaferis

Year: 2022

Project type: Master thesis, GIMA

Keywords: Convolutional Neural Networks

Topic tags: Object detection, Data augmentation

Thesis: Crosswalk detection – Karatzaferis 1/1

Technical Aspects link copied

Thesis Figure 18. Correct and incorrect predictions
Thesis Figure 18. Correct and incorrect predictions (Image copyright remains with paper author(s). Used with permission.)

The model exhibited a tendency to misidentify non-crosswalk linear objects as crosswalks, resulting in many false positive predictions. This issue was found to be caused by unclear training data. Data had been included which not only explicitly depicted roads, but also included wider urban and sub-urban regions where objects like windows and solar panels caused the model’s confusion. This can be solved by filtering the predicted crosswalk locations using a road buffer (which was done as part of this research), by pre-processing the detection dataset to filter out non-road areas or by including appropriate images as background true negative samples to the training dataset. 

Thesis Figure 17. Data training batch sample
Thesis Figure 17. Data training batch sample (Image copyright remains with paper author(s). Used with permission.)

The trained model was also tested with imagery of higher spatial resolution and image quality than the ones used to train it. While some additional crosswalk locations were identified this way, predictions on the high-resolution image included a dramatically increased number of false positives. This was attributed to the sharper depiction of background linear objects due to the higher image quality and spatial resolution, making them more susceptible to misidentification. Training a new model with high resolution imagery with an appropriately sized true negative sample would possibly help reduce the number of erroneous predictions. Such an approach would however greatly increase computational demands and make the designed system unsuitable for real-time detection.

  • OpenStreetMap and Overpass Turbo for collecting open-source geographic data
  • PDOK for aerial imagery
  • YOLOv5 for the pre-trained CNN model
  • Python in a Jupyter notebook for coding 
  • Colab virtual environment for model training
  • ESRI’s ArcGIS Pro for Pre- and post-processing & visualization