  Recent statistics reveal an alarming increase in accidents involving
pedestrians (especially children) crossing the street. A common philosophy of
existing pedestrian detection approaches is that this task should be undertaken
by the moving cars themselves. In sharp departure from this philosophy, we
propose to enlist the help of cars parked along the sidewalk to detect and
protect crossing pedestrians. In support of this goal, we propose ADOPT: a
system for Alerting Drivers to Occluded Pedestrian Traffic. ADOPT lays the
theoretical foundations of a system that uses parked cars to: (1) detect the
presence of a group of crossing pedestrians - a crossing cohort; (2) predict
the time the last member of the cohort takes to clear the street; (3) send
alert messages to those approaching cars that may reach the crossing area while
pedestrians are still in the street; and, (4) show how approaching cars can
adjust their speed, given several simultaneous crossing locations. Importantly,
in ADOPT all communications occur over very short distances and at very low
power. Our extensive simulations using SUMO-generated pedestrian and car
traffic have shown the effectiveness of ADOPT in detecting and protecting
crossing pedestrians.
