Pedestrian walking speed monitoring at street scale by an in-flight drone

The walking speed of pedestrians is not only a reflection of one’s physiological condition and health status but also a key parameter in the evaluation of the service level of urban facilities and traffic engineering applications, which is important for urban design and planning. Currently, the three main ways to obtain walking speed are based on trails, wearable devices, and images. The first two cannot be popularized in larger open areas, while the image-based approach requires multiple cameras to cooperate in order to extract the walking speed of an entire street, which is costly. In this study, a method for extracting the pedestrian walking speed at a street scale from in-flight drone video is proposed. Pedestrians are detected and tracked by You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) and Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric (DeepSORT) algorithms in the video taken from a flying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The distance that pedestrians traveled related to the ground per fixed time interval is calculated using a combined algorithm of Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and random sample consensus (RANSAC) followed by a geometric correction algorithm. Compared to ground truth values, it shows that 90.5% of the corrected walking speed predictions have an absolute error of less than 0.1 m/s. Overall, the method we have proposed is accurate and feasible. A particular advantage of this method is the ability to accurately predict the walking speed of pedestrians without keeping the flight speed of the UAV constant, facilitating accurate measurements by non-specialist technicians. In addition, because of the unrestricted flight range of the UAV, the method can be applied to the entire scale of the street, which assists in a better understanding of how the settings and layouts of urban affect people’s behavior.