Road Observation and Information Providing System for Supporting Mobility of Pedestrian

Abstract

We have been developing the Robotic Communication Terminals (RCT) as a mobility support system for elderly and disabled people, which assists their impaired elements of mobility - recognition, actuation, and information access. The RCT consists of three types of terminals: "Environment Embedded Terminal (EET)", "user-carried mobile terminal", and "user-carrying mobile terminal". The EET system robustly detects moving objects at an outdoor surveillance site all day, and presents walkers with information about their surroundings. In this paper, as a part of the EET, we propose a method for detecting moving objects based on temporal differencing using adaptive thresholding calculated from intensity changes in the past few frames. For 23 cases of video evaluation, a high detection rate was measured under the variations caused by meteorological effects. We also have developed a test bed system that provides real-time road information detected by the EET to the map-based terminal. In the case of three clients, we demonstrate that users can receive the information from the EET with a 0.152[sec] time delay.