  Pedestrians' safety is a crucial factor in assessing autonomous driving
scenarios. However, pedestrian safety evaluation is rarely considered by
existing autonomous driving simulation platforms. This paper proposes a
pedestrian safety evaluation method for autonomous driving, in which not only
the collision events but also the conflict events together with the
characteristics of pedestrians are fully considered. Moreover, to apply the
pedestrian safety evaluation system, we construct a high-fidelity simulation
framework embedded with pedestrian safety-critical characteristics. We
demonstrate our simulation framework and pedestrian safety evaluation with a
comparative experiment with two kinds of autonomous driving perception
algorithms -- single-vehicle perception and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I)
cooperative perception. The results show that our framework can evaluate
different autonomous driving algorithms with detailed and quantitative
pedestrian safety indexes. To this end, the proposed simulation method and
framework can be used to access different autonomous driving algorithms and
evaluate pedestrians' safety performance in future autonomous driving
simulations, which can inspire more pedestrian-friendly autonomous driving
algorithms.
