Robust Pedestrian Detection and Intrusion Judgment in Coal Yard Hazard Areas via 3D LiDAR-Based Deep Learning

Pedestrian intrusion in coal yard work areas is a major cause of accidents, posing challenges for the safe supervision of coal yards. Existing visual detection methods suffer under poor lighting and a lack of 3D data. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces a robust pedestrian intrusion detection method based on 3D LiDAR. Our approach consists of three main components. First, we propose a novel pedestrian detection network called EFT-RCNN. Based on Voxel-RCNN, this network introduces an EnhancedVFE module to improve spatial feature extraction, employs FocalConv to reconstruct the 3D backbone network for enhanced foreground-background distinction, and utilizes TeBEVPooling to optimize bird's eye view (BEV) generation. Second, a precise 3D hazardous area is defined by combining a polygonal base surface, determined through on-site exploration, with height constraints. Finally, a point-region hierarchical judgment method is designed to calculate the spatial relationship between pedestrians and the hazardous area for graded warning. When evaluated on the public KITTI dataset, the EFT-RCNN network improved the average precision for pedestrian detection by 4.39% in 3D and 4.68% in BEV compared with the baseline, while maintaining a real-time processing speed of 28.56 FPS. In practical tests, the pedestrian detection accuracy reached 92.9%, with an average error in distance measurement of 0.054 m. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively mitigates complex environmental interference, enables robust detection, and provides a reliable means for the proactive prevention of pedestrian intrusion accidents.