Smart Tramway Systems for Smart Cities: A Deep Learning Application in ADAS Systems

Artificial intelligence and deep learning-based techniques undoubtedly are the future of Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) technologies. In this article is presented a technique for detecting, recognizing and tracking pedestrians, vehicles and cyclists along a tramway infrastructure in a complex urban environment by Computer Vision, Deep Learning approaches and YOLOv3 algorithm. Experiments have been conducted in the tramway Line 2 “Borgonuovo –Notarbartolo” (Palermo, Italy) in correspondence of the tramway segments crossing a roundabout having an external diameter of 24 m. A survey vehicle equipped with a video camera was used in the study. The results of the research show that the proposed method is able to search and detect the position and the speed of road users near and over the rails in front of the tram in a very precise way as demonstrate by the estimated values of the Accuracy, Loss and Precision obtained during the neural networks training process. The implementation of this advanced detection method in ADAS systems may increase the safety of novel autonomous trams and autonomous rapid trams (ARTs).