SafeJourney

A Pedestrian Map using Safety Annotation for Route Determination

K. H. Yew Ta Thu Ha S. D. Silva Jose Paua
Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Universiti Teknologi Universiti Teknologi
Malaysia. PETRONAS, Malaysia. PETRONAS, Malaysia.
yew_kwang_hooi@hotmail.com thuha187@gmail.com spaua@gmail.com

conditions and physically challenging paths.

Abstract – When travelling alone in an unknown
urban area, pedestrians are exposed to a higher risk
of accident or assault. In light of this growing
concern, we propose that safety annotation to be
included as one of the pedestrian map attributes
and using it to recommend a relatively safer route.
Unlike motorist map, pedestrian map must also
include pedestrian-oriented features and noticeable
landmarks in order to optimize the path. This
paper presents the techniques to determine
relatively safe path, its future works and challenges.
Keywords: mobile navigation assistance, human
factors, road safety
Vehicle crash accounts for most of the injuries
and deaths. According to the Insurance Institute
for Highway Safety, the U.S.A, pedestrians are
the second largest category of motor vehicle
deaths after occupants, accounting for 11% of
motor vehicle deaths. The highly affected group
is children under age of 15. Frequency of incident
is reportedly higher in urban area due to its
higher pedestrian traffic volume, see Fig. 2 [10].
Pedestrians caught in unfavorable situations: -
late travelling or missing the last public transport,
may find better comfort and security if the trip be
can planed earlier to avoid unfriendly routes.

I. INTRODUCTION

Interest in digital map has grown due to its

portability, updatability, manual/auto-
orientability and extensibility to support other
applications [1]. Digital map does not only assist
navigation for motorists [2,3,4] but also used by
increasing number of pedestrian user [5,6], as
evidenced by Google Maps’ (Fig.1) [7] inclusion
Figure 1: Google Map for pedestrian with route guidance
of pedestrian routes.

Pedestrian map is different from motorist one

in that it includes pedestrian-oriented attributes
such as pavements, walkways, pathways,
subways, pedestrian bridges, waypoints, various
landmarks, obstacles and public mass transport
system. The larger set of attributes, sometimes up
to 53 attributes according to LBS Insight, result
in a more complex route determination [5,8].

According to ambulance and police records,

pedestrians are susceptible to crime and injuries Figure 2: Area types where pedestrian fatalities or injuries are
[5,9] due to factors such as crash, robbery, rape, common in New Zealand from 1996-2008. (Source: Ministry
of Transport, New Zealand)
animal attack, assaults, extreme weather

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 II. PROBLEM STATEMENT
Existing digital pedestrian map is able to
optimize the shortest route based on pedestrian-
oriented physical attributes but largely ignorant
of route safety. In light of growing safety
concern, routes in future digital map may be
annotated with safety index to extend its
functionality from traditional navigation to a
safety advisory system.
III. LITERATURE REVIEW
Related works that need to be addressed
originate from two areas: road safety and mobile
information systems.
Literature review of road safety has shown
pedestrian’s contexts such as gender, age group
and body condition (blindness, deafness, etc)
affect his or her degree of concern towards path
contexts such as street lighting, walkways and
risk rate [11]. Contrary to common belief,
Puikkonen’s paper suggests that distance
information is a less significant path context and
may not be necessary for pedestrian navigation
instructions [12].
Risk rate may be used to annotate nodes and is
determined statistically. European Road Safety
Observatory [13] calculates risk rate exposed to
pedestrians using the following formula:
(1)
where,
road safety outcome
= the number of reported incidents;
amount of exposure
= the number of reported incidents restricted
to a specific period, area or time based on
its theoretical importance.
Previous attempt to incorporate safety
information into pedestrian/cyclist map can be
referenced from Internet GIS for Safe Route to
School (SRTS) project, see Fig.3. SRTS is an
2
online map that allows authority of Flagstaff,
Arizona marks walkable areas to school, at the
moment, only for Sechrist Elementary school.
The portal can be referred to by parents whose
children walk or cycle to school [8].
Figure 3: Route guidance for school-going children demo web
application
For handicapped users, Volkel proposed
adaptive calculation and annotation of routes to
guide blind pedestrian to a longer but friendlier
routes [14,15].
Global Positioning System (GPS) is useful to
reduce motorist’s cognitive load by determining
the orientation and advising the next navigational
step. However, in the case of a pedestrian map, a
few papers have commented that GPS alone is
not sufficient at the pedestrian level [1, 16]. Due
to lack of pedestrian-oriented features and eye-
catching items or landmarks, the paths suggested
by these systems are not always optimal [1, 12].
To address the deficiencies, Thuy et. al. had
developed a pedestrian-friendly GPS based
system prototype that merges fluxgate compass,
real-time text-to-speech (TTS) engine, path-
planning using Dijkstra and pedestrian features
[16] and preliminary finding is encouraging.
Several researchers had pointed out that
conventional Graphical User Interface (GUI) for
handheld devices might not be practical for
pedestrians. Pedestrians may not be able to digest
graphical information since pedestrians are often
exposed to distractions such as passing
pedestrians or vehicles, reflecting displays due to
sunlight or having only one free hand.
M. Jost et. al explored the most suitable
interaction paradigm and informative tasks for
pedestrians [17]. Two early intelligent tour and TABLE I. RISKS PROBABILITY FOR PEDESTRIAN INJURY

city guides were compared:- CyberGuide Injury risks Probability

interacts with user through GUI; and Deep Map Motor vehicle accident 63.2%
uses spoken language. The study suggests that Accidental fall 31.6%
introducing novel interaction methods may meet Attack by stray animal 2.6%
Assault 2.6%
some resistance. However, recent development
and insight about how multimodality can enhance
the usability of hand-held devices have inspired
more efficient and easy-to-use user interfaces for
V. SYSTEM ANALYSIS AND DESIGN
pedestrian navigation. Effective forms of
navigation guidance range from the best auditory,
text-based and image-based prompts [12,17, 18]. SafeJourney provides path guidance for macro-
navigation, i.e. navigation distance with minimal
radius of 10m [14]. Risk-prone areas are
IV. METHODOLOGY identified and annotated using path context. User
enters preferred path context for the system to
compute the best matching route, as indicated by
Every geographical location may have different
use case diagram in Fig. 4.
risks rate [8], hence data collection is conducted
to identify safety issues prevalent to a
geographical area. High-risk point along path can
be best determined from statistical record based
on datasets from emergency calls and ambulance
reports [9]. However, survey on the public
perception can also help to identify risks not
reported.

As our preliminary investigation, we had

chosen a smaller geography for the study. The
areas covered are University Teknologi Petronas’
commonly accessed infrastructures and all the
possible links between these places.
We conducted initial survey on residents of
Universiti Technology Petronas to find out their
perception of pedestrian safety within the
campus. Sixty in-campus students from a
random mix of gender and familiarity with the
environment (new students or more senior
students) were questioned over a period of 2
years. We had also interviewed the security
department to acquire statistics of incidents.
The outcome, summarized in TABLE I,
indicates the biggest factor of pedestrian injury is
crash by motor vehicle, which conforms with
literature review on the most common cause of
pedestrian injuries/fatalities. As expected, other
causes such as assault or robbery is low due to
the fact that university is a safe compound.
Nevertheless, the proportion of the latter is
coherent with literature review.
Figure 4: System use case summarizes the basic flows and
functionalities
User input and annotation dictate whether a
node should be omitted or included for
computation. Each node represents a point on the
map and store relevant information:
 Pixel coordinates of landmark and accessory
points. (Note: Accessory points are non-
landmark points used to help drawing
smoother curvy route.)
 Geographical coordinates of landmarks and
accessory points, collected using
Geographical Positioning System (GPS).
 The absolute distance and estimated time to
traverse between any two adjacent points.
Safety annotation, the perceived safety context
of a path, is stored on a pair of adjacent nodes.
Multiple interconnecting paths form the route to
be taken from source to destination.

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A. Algorithms B. Database Tables.

Djikstra is used to determine the shortest route The data of nodes, paths, key paths and results
since the choice of algorithm did not have are kept in a relational database management
implication on the research objective. Given a system (RDBMS) for persistency and
weighted graph G (that is a set V of vertices, a set extensibility when the data grow in volume.
E of edges, and a real-valued weight function f : Fig. 7 shows the relationship of the tables:
E → R), and one element v of V, a path P from v  Path table (Fig. 5) - contains two
to a v' of V is given by a minimal ∑f(p), pєP adjacent nodes, safety annotation and
among all paths connecting v to v' [19]. other display information.
 Node table (Fig. 6) - contains display
The Djikstra algorithm is as follows: information and metadata required for
DO
route computation.
Choose a node to be the root.  Best_route table - cache containing a
Mark it as relaxed.
Check if there is any adjacent node AND not
string result of shortest route algorithm
relaxed. applied on Path and Node datasets. The
IF yes THEN string contains interconnecting nodeIDs.
Of all the adjacent nodes, choose the
closest.
Update the node’s distance from root
Update the distance of all the nodes
adjacent to the chosen node.
Mark the chosen node as relaxed.
ELSE
Back trace every relaxed node to the root.
Update the Path table.
ENDIF
UNTIL(all nodes are evaluated as root nodes)

Djikstra’s computation of the shortest path is

based on distance or time span. Therefore,
appropriate modification is needed. The
modification will ensure only nodes that fulfill Figure 5: Path table
user-set safety criteria are used in the
computation. The following algorithm describes
how the nodes are chosen, and then fed to
Djikstra:
IF no criteria is selected THEN
Select all nodes from node table.
ELSE
Query path table.
Select paths fulfilling required safety
criteria.
Query nodes of the selected paths. Figure 6: Node table
Return the nodes.
ENDIF
System recommended route is a serial
Feed to Djikstra algorithm connection of intermediary paths. Hence, the
estimated travel distance and time can be
The algorithm initially traverses through all generated from individual path information:
paths in the table. Paths that fulfill required safety
criteria will be returned at the end of the Total distance, D = ∑i=0 n distance, n = total paths (2)
traversal. Multiple criteria may be used to
evaluate if a path should be included in the route Total time, T = ∑i=0 n time, n = total paths (3)
computation using AND logic operation.

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 Figure 9: Web input form

Figure 7: Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) Eventually, the query returns a string of unique
node ID that forms the connecting paths. To
C. Architecture acquire details of each node, the system refers to
the “Node” table, as in Fig. 6.
The 3-tier web application consists of the
following (see Fig. 8):
 Tier 1 - web browser on a desktop or
mobile phone using XHTML and Flash
client.
 Tier 2 – Route determination using PHP
scripts running on Apache
 Tier 3 - MySQL RDBMS to store path
data and result.

Three-tier architecture permits extensibility.

When map changes, administrator needs to edit
the path and node tables in back-end database.
On the front end, simple user interface requires
only direct input of information on starting point,
destination and desired safety criteria, as in Fig.
9. The server-side PHP scripts use entered
parameters to query database, as in Fig. 10.
Client Server

ActionScript
HTTP and PHP Server

GSM/GPRS/3G

Cell phone Query

processing to
Query
Processing HTTP server
Figure 10: Activity diagram showing basic processes in the
Algorithm saves
optimal path details
save and
retrieve
optimal path
script requests data
from Nodes
Table to
system
on the Path table
determine
and Actionscript
optimal path
retrieves the optimal
path and plots the
line

MYSQL Server
Data Entry
Interface

Key_path
Table

Administrator

Best_route
Node Table Path Table
table

Database
Database table that Database table
table that Database
stores nodes that stores
stores Details table that
and distances optimal routes
of individual stores sounds
between determined by
node of main paths
nodes the algorithm

Figure 8: System architecture

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 VI. RESULT AND DISCUSSION

The front-end output is available in two modes:

 Desktop browser: - PHP loads Flash
client to gather user input (Fig. 10). The
query result draws vector lines on raster
map to highlight the route (Fig. 12). Figure 13: Cell phone result in the form of step-by-step
instructions
 Hand-held device: - display the
navigational instructions in texts and The prototype has shown techniques to
images, providing step-by-step incorporate safety annotation into the system and
navigation (Fig. 13). to utilize the data for route guidance. The
techniques require only appropriate table design
and a simple query algorithm.
Get user input
The real challenge however lies in the difficulty
of collecting reliable safety annotation data. In
PHP connect to database
this research, the limitation is that we are relying
on respondents’ feedbacks and opinions for
PHP prints the result on screen
determination of the safety dataset. In actual
PHP loads SWF on the screen
implementation, we could make use of existing
ambulance and police report database.
SWF triggers the PHP script that
queries the database, returning an Future work may require a more realistic and
array of values
bigger scale environment to test the concept’s
practicality and effectiveness in enhancing
SWF draws lines on the map based
on the array pedestrian safety (reduction of pedestrian injuries
values or assaults). This includes the use of actual
Yes
dataset and field testing.
Continue ?

No
VII. CONCLUSION

Figure 11: Flash client displays provides user interactivity.

This paper has presented the technicalities of
using safety annotation to provide route guidance
that potentially enhance pedestrian safety. Basic
concepts, general architecture and prototype of
the system have been developed. Using the
campus ground as the test bed, we have shown
that it is technically feasible and early potential
users’ response to the research is positive.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We would like to thank the management of

Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS and student
volunteers for helps rendered.

Figure 12: Route proposed by the system

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