Pedestrian Crossing Intent Classification From Event-Based Vision Using Convolutional Spiking Neural Networks With Temporal Augmentation

Abstract:Anticipating whether a pedestrian will cross the road is safety-critical for autonomous vehicles, requiring real-time inference under challenging conditions including motion blur, high dynamic range, and class imbalance. Conventional frame-based deep networks process redundant RGB data at fixed frame rates, limiting their temporal resolution and energy efficiency. In this work we present an end-to-end pipeline that (i) converts real-world driving footage from the Joint Attention in Autonomous Driving (JAAD) dataset into synthetic dynamic vision sensor (DVS) event streams using the v2e simulator, (ii) augments training with the CARLA-simulated DVS sequences of the DVS-PedX dataset under both normal and adverse weather conditions, and (iii) trains a novel convolutional spiking neural network (Conv-SNN) with clip-consistent DVS augmentation to classify pedestrian crossing intent as binary: crossing or non-crossing. We detail all architectural decisions, the exact leaky-integrate-and-fire neuron dynamics with surrogate-gradient learning, the class-balanced loss formulation, JAAD oversampling at 6x, and a 70/15/15 stratified splitting protocol. The trained model achieves 95.83% accuracy and F1 = 0.9695 on the JAAD DVS test set, 97.79% accuracy and F1 = 0.9478 on normal CARLA DVS, and 94.78% accuracy and F1 = 0.8369 on adverse-weather CARLA DVS, all from a 1.07M-parameter architecture trained on CPU. Compared to prior frame-based approaches on JAAD, our method closes or surpasses the reported accuracy while operating natively on sparse temporal representations. We include a thorough analysis of the convergence behaviour across all 15 training epochs, domain transfer characteristics, and a quantitative comparison with representative related work.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.13328 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.13328v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.13328 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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