Cross-Cultural Behavior Analysis of Street-Crossing Pedestrians in Japan and Germany.

Software solutions for advanced driver assistant systems should be culturally fair, in particular when perceiving and reacting to pedestrians. To ensure the generation of suitable training and testing scenarios, a detailed understanding of pedestrian behavior and cultural differences in behavior must be established. However, direct comparisons between the populations in different countries are scarce and complicated to conduct in real environments. In this work, we present the first cross-cultural pedestrian behavior study analyzing and comparing pedestrian behavior between Japanese and German pedestrians. For this purpose, a new and large-scale virtual reality (VR) environment was created and the same experiment was conducted in Germany and in Japan. We identified new insights in gap selection, choice of velocity, following behavior, and route choice. Particularly for the route choice adjacent to zebra crossings, the differences between Japanese and German pedestrians are more complex than past studies might suggest. In addition, the data captured in the VR environment can be directly utilized to train and test algorithms used in intelligent vehicles in a digital domain.