London’s unpredictable pedestrians are teaching driverless cars to avoid hitting people.

Software is being developed by a start-up based at Imperial College to scan and analyse footage of people walking along the capital’s busiest streets.

It is then used to help autonomous vehicles better predict human behaviour and decision-making just before they dart across the road.

Leslie Nooteboom, co-founder of Humanising Autonomy, said Londoners’ behaviour was “risky” and “confident” compared with our neighbours on the Continent. Driverless cars are still in their infancy in the UK, with London trials undertaken at low speeds and off-road on Greenwich Peninsula.

But the start-up, based at the Imperial Enterprise Lab, has already worked with Mercedes and Airbus on the “intent prediction” technology, which it also plans to deploy in autonomous taxis and for training bus drivers.

The system teaches itself by scouring dashcam and roadside footage of busy roads, including Oxford Street, Regent Street and the Strand.

Mr Nooteboom claims the technology gives the car “total intelligence” about pedestrians’ behaviour.

He said: “We are very confident that we are able to predict if someone is going to cross or not… Cars need to understand the full breadth of human behaviour before they’re ever going to be implemented into urban environments. The current technology is able to understand whether something is a pedestrian and not a lamp post, and where that pedestrian is moving, framing them as a box. We’re looking inside that box to see what the person is doing, where they’re looking, are they aware of the car, are they on the phone or running — does this mean they are distracted, or risky?

“We have algorithms that recognise more than 150 human behaviours so that the car understands it has to brake because the person is distracted, or has to swerve because he’s going to run on to the road.

“Looking at the movement of a person is not enough to predict if they will cross. As a human driver, you’d know if someone is maybe limping, or not looking at you so you have to slow down — a car needs to know that too if you remove the driver.”