You’re likely not going to run over a pedestrian that you’ve noticed. So, the pedestrians that are most in danger are the ones you didn’t see. The ones that blend into the background or are just in unexpected places. A driving assistance system should draw your attention to these kinds of pedestrians to ensure you make the right decisions. During my PhD at the Max Planck Institute I did a study combining experimental psychology and computer vision to predict which pedestrians are hard to notice and model where your attention should be direct to maximize the likelihood that you’re going to notice all pedestrians in a scene.

I’ve just added a summary of the ideas and results of the paper to the publications section. You can also download and read the pdf.