Image Segmentation-Based Bicycle Riding Side Identification Method

Abstract

This paper attempts to identify which side of the road a bicycle is currently riding on using a common camera for realizing an advanced bicycle navigation system and bicycle riding safety support system. To identify the roadway area, the proposed method performs semantic segmentation on a front camera image captured by a bicycle drive recorder or smartphone. If the roadway area extends from the center of the image to the right, the bicyclist is riding on the left side of the roadway (i.e., the correct riding position in Japan). In contrast, if the roadway area extends to the left, the bicyclist is on the right side of the roadway (i.e., the incorrect riding position in Japan). We evaluated the accuracy of the proposed method on various road widths with different traffic volumes using video captured by riding bicycles in Tsuruoka City, Yamagata Prefecture, and Saitama City, Saitama Prefecture, Japan. High accuracy (>80%) was achieved for any combination of the segmentation model, riding side identification method, and experimental conditions. Given these results, we believe that we have realized an effective image segmentation-based method to identify which side of the roadway a bicycle riding is on.