Lightweight Pedestrian Head-Orientation Recognition Network for Safe Pedestrian-Vehicle Interaction

Pedestrian head orientation recognition plays an important role in autonomous driving by providing valuable cues for understanding pedestrian attention and anticipating potential crossing behavior. However, reliable recognition in real-world traffic scenes remains challenging because pedestrian head regions are often captured at low resolution. To address this challenge, we propose a lightweight Low-Resolution Head Orientation Convolutional Neural Network (LRHO-CNN) for pedestrian head orientation recognition. We construct a new dataset by extracting pedestrian head images from multiple public datasets and manually annotating them into eight orientation categories. The collected images are systematically preprocessed and augmented to increase data diversity and better represent variations in illumination and image quality. The experimental analysis compares LRHO-CNN with three fine-tuned baseline models, namely ResNet-18, ResNet-34, and VGG-16. The results demonstrate that LRHO-CNN achieves the highest classification accuracy among the evaluated models. LRHO-CNN is further evaluated on the JAAD and PIE datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in recognizing pedestrian head orientation in real-world traffic scenes and providing informative head-orientation cues that can support downstream pedestrian behavior and intention prediction.