An Integrated Roadside Sensing and Communication Framework for Vulnerable Road User Safety at Signalized Intersections
Vulnerable road users (VRUs) account for approximately half of urban traffic deaths globally, with intersections concentrating a disproportionate share of these casualties. Recent reviews of sensing technology for VRU protection have cataloged dozens of single-sensor and dual-sensor deployments, yet none of the surveyed systems couples multi-modal sensing with edge-side near-miss analytics and bidirectional vehicle-to-everything (V2X) and pedestrian-to-everything (P2X) messaging in a single intersection cabinet. This paper presents an integrated framework for VRU protection at signalized intersections, combining LiDAR, radar, RGB camera, and thermal camera at the perception layer, edge-based prediction and surrogate-safety analytics at the computation layer, V2X and P2X messaging at the communication layer, and adaptive signal control at the actuation layer. The framework is grounded in an empirical case study using R-LiViT, the first publicly released roadside LiDAR-Visual-Thermal dataset, which provides 200 multi-modal sequences and 2,400 annotated RGB-T frames at three German intersections. Analysis of 53,319 detection annotations reveals that VRUs comprise approximately 49% of all road-user observations, that day-to-night density drops by 38% for pedestrians and 45% for vehicles while the night distribution shows a higher close-proximity share, that per-frame close-proximity event counts vary approximately 10-fold across the eight unique locations at three intersections, and that 83% of pedestrian bounding boxes are small in image space, indicating that VRUs are typically far from any single sensor. These findings support multi-modal sensing, edge-side analytics, and adaptive context-sensitive deployment rather than uniform single-sensor solutions.