Watch Out! Modelling Pedestrians with Egocentric Distractions

ABSTRACTThe use of mobile devices is one of the most commonly observed family of distracted behaviours exhibited by pedestrians in urban environments. We develop an event-driven behaviour tree model for distracted pedestrians that includes initiating mobile device use as well as terminating or pausing mobile device use based on internal or external cues to refocus attention. We present a simple, probabilistic attention model for such pedestrians. The proposed model is not meant to be complete. It primarily focuses on computing the probability that a distracted agent looks up, based on the agent’s individual characteristics and the elements in their environment. We condition the potentially attention grabbing elements in the environment on distraction-specific egocentric fields for visual attention. We also propose an oriented ellipse model for capturing the affects of cognitively fuzzy goals during distracted navigation. Our model is simple and intuitively parameterized, and thus can be easily edited and extended.