Pedestrian Intention Classifier using ID3 Modelled Decision Trees for IoT Edge Devices

Road accidents involving autonomous vehicles commonly occur in situations where a (pedestrian) obstacle presents itself in the path of the moving vehicle at very sudden time intervals, leaving the robot even lesser time to react to the change in scene. In order to tackle this issue, we propose a novel algorithmic implementation that classifies the intent of a single arbitrarily chosen pedestrian in a two dimensional frame into logic states in a procedural manner using quaternions generated from a MediaPipe pose estimation model. This bypasses the need to employ any relatively high latency deep-learning algorithms primarily due to the lack of necessity for depth perception as well as an implicit cap on the computational resources that most IoT edge devices present. The model was able to achieve an average testing accuracy of 83.56% with a reliable variance of 0.0042 while operating with an average latency of 48 milliseconds, demonstrating multiple notable advantages over the current standard of using spatio-temporal convolutional networks for these perceptive tasks.