PERCEPTION AND UNDERSTANDING OF VULNERABLE ROAD USERS

Autonomous vehicles utilize perception and understanding of road users and road objects to predict behaviors of the road users and road objects, and to plan a trajectory for the vehicle. Understanding subtypes and attributes of vulnerable road users may help autonomous vehicles better predict behaviors of and react to vulnerable road users. To offer additional understanding capabilities, an additional understanding model is added to the perception and understanding pipeline to improve classification of vulnerable road users and extraction of attributes of the vulnerable road users. The exemplary architectures of the understanding model balance recall and precision performance metrics and computational complexity.