A novel Big Data analytics and intelligent technique to predict driver's intent

Modern age offers a great potential for automatically predicting the driver's intent through the increasing miniaturization of computing technologies, rapid advancements in communication technologies and continuous connectivity of heterogeneous smart objects. Inside the cabin and engine of modern cars, dedicated computer systems need to possess the ability to exploit the wealth of information generated by heterogeneous data sources with different contextual and conceptual representations. Processing and utilizing this diverse and voluminous data, involves many challenges concerning the design of the computational technique used to perform this task. In this paper, we investigate the various data sources available in the car and the surrounding environment, which can be utilized as inputs in order to predict driver's intent and behavior. As part of investigating these potential data sources, we conducted experiments on e-calendars for a large number of employees, and have reviewed a number of available geo referencing systems. Through the results of a statistical analysis and by computing location recognition accuracy results, we explored in detail the potential utilization of calendar location data to detect the driver's intentions. In order to exploit the numerous diverse data inputs available in modern vehicles, we investigate the suitability of different Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques, and propose a novel fuzzy computational modelling methodology. Finally, we outline the impact of applying advanced CI and Big Data analytics techniques in modern vehicles on the driver and society in general, and discuss ethical and legal issues arising from the deployment of intelligent self-learning cars

Modelling of Driver and Pedestrian Behaviour – A Historical Review

Driver and pedestrian behaviour significantly affect the safety and the flow of traffic at the microscopic and macroscopic levels. The driver behaviour models describe the driver decisions made in different traffic flow conditions. Modelling the pedestrian behaviour plays an essential role in the analysis of pedestrian flows in the areas such as public transit terminals, pedestrian zones, evacuations, etc. Driver behaviour models, integrated into simulation tools, can be divided into car-following models and lane-changing models. The simulation tools are used to replicate traffic flows and infer certain regularities. Particular model parameters must be appropriately calibrated to approximate the realistic traffic flow conditions. This paper describes the existing car-following models, lane-changing models, and pedestrian behaviour models. Further, it underlines the importance of calibrating the parameters of microsimulation models to replicate realistic traffic flow conditions and sets the guidelines for future research related to the development of new models and the improvement of the existing ones.</p

A Learning-Based Framework for Two-Dimensional Vehicle Maneuver Prediction over V2V Networks

Situational awareness in vehicular networks could be substantially improved utilizing reliable trajectory prediction methods. More precise situational awareness, in turn, results in notably better performance of critical safety applications, such as Forward Collision Warning (FCW), as well as comfort applications like Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC). Therefore, vehicle trajectory prediction problem needs to be deeply investigated in order to come up with an end to end framework with enough precision required by the safety applications' controllers. This problem has been tackled in the literature using different methods. However, machine learning, which is a promising and emerging field with remarkable potential for time series prediction, has not been explored enough for this purpose. In this paper, a two-layer neural network-based system is developed which predicts the future values of vehicle parameters, such as velocity, acceleration, and yaw rate, in the first layer and then predicts the two-dimensional, i.e. longitudinal and lateral, trajectory points based on the first layer's outputs. The performance of the proposed framework has been evaluated in realistic cut-in scenarios from Safety Pilot Model Deployment (SPMD) dataset and the results show a noticeable improvement in the prediction accuracy in comparison with the kinematics model which is the dominant employed model by the automotive industry. Both ideal and nonideal communication circumstances have been investigated for our system evaluation. For non-ideal case, an estimation step is included in the framework before the parameter prediction block to handle the drawbacks of packet drops or sensor failures and reconstruct the time series of vehicle parameters at a desirable frequency

PFL-LSTR: A privacy-preserving framework for driver intention inference based on in-vehicle and out-vehicle information

Intelligent vehicle anticipation of the movement intentions of other drivers can reduce collisions. Typically, when a human driver of another vehicle (referred to as the target vehicle) engages in specific behaviors such as checking the rearview mirror prior to lane change, a valuable clue is therein provided on the intentions of the target vehicle's driver. Furthermore, the target driver's intentions can be influenced and shaped by their driving environment. For example, if the target vehicle is too close to a leading vehicle, it may renege the lane change decision. On the other hand, a following vehicle in the target lane is too close to the target vehicle could lead to its reversal of the decision to change lanes. Knowledge of such intentions of all vehicles in a traffic stream can help enhance traffic safety. Unfortunately, such information is often captured in the form of images/videos. Utilization of personally identifiable data to train a general model could violate user privacy. Federated Learning (FL) is a promising tool to resolve this conundrum. FL efficiently trains models without exposing the underlying data. This paper introduces a Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) model embedded a long short-term transformer (LSTR) framework. The framework predicts drivers' intentions by leveraging in-vehicle videos (of driver movement, gestures, and expressions) and out-of-vehicle videos (of the vehicle's surroundings - frontal/rear areas). The proposed PFL-LSTR framework is trained and tested through real-world driving data collected from human drivers at Interstate 65 in Indiana. The results suggest that the PFL-LSTR exhibits high adaptability and high precision, and that out-of-vehicle information (particularly, the driver's rear-mirror viewing actions) is important because it helps reduce false positives and thereby enhances the precision of driver intention inference.Comment: Submitted for presentation only at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Boar

A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Methods for Lane Change Intention Recognition Using Vehicle Trajectory Data

Accurately detecting and predicting lane change (LC)processes can help autonomous vehicles better understand their surrounding environment, recognize potential safety hazards, and improve traffic safety. This paper focuses on LC processes and compares different machine learning methods' performance to recognize LC intention from high-dimensionality time series data. To validate the performance of the proposed models, a total number of 1023 vehicle trajectories is extracted from the CitySim dataset. For LC intention recognition issues, the results indicate that with ninety-eight percent of classification accuracy, ensemble methods reduce the impact of Type II and Type III classification errors. Without sacrificing recognition accuracy, the LightGBM demonstrates a sixfold improvement in model training efficiency than the XGBoost algorithm.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2304.1373

Driver lane change intention inference for intelligent vehicles: framework, survey, and challenges

Intelligent vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) need to have proper awareness of the traffic context as well as the driver status since ADAS share the vehicle control authorities with the human driver. This study provides an overview of the ego-vehicle driver intention inference (DII), which mainly focus on the lane change intention on highways. First, a human intention mechanism is discussed in the beginning to gain an overall understanding of the driver intention. Next, the ego-vehicle driver intention is classified into different categories based on various criteria. A complete DII system can be separated into different modules, which consists of traffic context awareness, driver states monitoring, and the vehicle dynamic measurement module. The relationship between these modules and the corresponding impacts on the DII are analyzed. Then, the lane change intention inference (LCII) system is reviewed from the perspective of input signals, algorithms, and evaluation. Finally, future concerns and emerging trends in this area are highlighted

AI-based framework for automatically extracting high-low features from NDS data to understand driver behavior

Our ability to detect and characterize unsafe driving behaviors in naturalistic driving environments and associate them with road crashes will be a significant step toward developing effective crash countermeasures. Due to some limitations, researchers have not yet fully achieved the stated goal of characterizing unsafe driving behaviors. These limitations include, but are not limited to, the high cost of data collection and the manual processes required to extract information from NDS data. In light of this limitations, the primary objective of this study is to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) framework for automatically extracting high-low features from the NDS dataset to explain driver behavior using a low-cost data collection method. The author proposed three novel objectives for achieving the study's objective in light of the identified research gaps. Initially, the study develops a low-cost data acquisition system for gathering data on naturalistic driving. Second, the study develops a framework that automatically extracts high- to low-level features, such as vehicle density, turning movements, and lane changes, from the data collected by the developed data acquisition system. Thirdly, the study extracted information from the NDS data to gain a better understanding of people's car-following behavior and other driving behaviors in order to develop countermeasures for traffic safety through data collection and analysis. The first objective of this study is to develop a multifunctional smartphone application for collecting NDS data. Three major modules comprised the designed app: a front-end user interface module, a sensor module, and a backend module. The front-end, which is also the application's user interface, was created to provide a streamlined view that exposed the application's key features via a tab bar controller. This allows us to compartmentalize the application's critical components into separate views. The backend module provides computational resources that can be used to accelerate front-end query responses. Google Firebase powered the backend of the developed application. The sensor modules included CoreMotion, CoreLocation, and AVKit. CoreMotion collects motion and environmental data from the onboard hardware of iOS devices, including accelerometers, gyroscopes, pedometers, magnetometers, and barometers. In contrast, CoreLocation determines the altitude, orientation, and geographical location of a device, as well as its position relative to an adjacent iBeacon device. The AVKit finally provides a high-level interface for video content playback. To achieve objective two, we formulated the problem as both a classification and time-series segmentation problem. This is due to the fact that the majority of existing driver maneuver detection methods formulate the problem as a pure classification problem, assuming a discretized input signal with known start and end locations for each event or segment. In practice, however, vehicle telemetry data used for detecting driver maneuvers are continuous; thus, a fully automated driver maneuver detection system should incorporate solutions for both time series segmentation and classification. The five stages of our proposed methodology are as follows: 1) data preprocessing, 2) segmentation of events, 3) machine learning classification, 4) heuristics classification, and 5) frame-by-frame video annotation. The result of the study indicates that the gyroscope reading is an exceptional parameter for extracting driving events, as its accuracy was consistent across all four models developed. The study reveals that the Energy Maximization Algorithm's accuracy ranges from 56.80 percent (left lane change) to 85.20 percent (right lane change) (lane-keeping) All four models developed had comparable accuracies to studies that used similar models. The 1D-CNN model had the highest accuracy (98.99 percent), followed by the LSTM model (97.75 percent), the RF model (97.71 percent), and the SVM model (97.65 percent). To serve as a ground truth, continuous signal data was annotated. In addition, the proposed method outperformed the fixed time window approach. The study analyzed the overall pipeline's accuracy by penalizing the F1 scores of the ML models with the EMA's duration score. The pipeline's accuracy ranged between 56.8 percent and 85.0 percent overall. The ultimate goal of this study was to extract variables from naturalistic driving videos that would facilitate an understanding of driver behavior in a naturalistic driving environment. To achieve this objective, three sub-goals were established. First, we developed a framework for extracting features pertinent to comprehending the behavior of natural-environment drivers. Using the extracted features, we then analyzed the car-following behaviors of various demographic groups. Thirdly, using a machine learning algorithm, we modeled the acceleration of both the ego-vehicle and the leading vehicle. Younger drivers are more likely to be aggressive, according to the findings of this study. In addition, the study revealed that drivers tend to accelerate when the distance between them and the vehicle in front of them is substantial. Lastly, compared to younger drivers, elderly motorists maintain a significantly larger following distance. This study's results have numerous safety implications. First, the analysis of the driving behavior of different demographic groups will enable safety engineers to develop the most effective crash countermeasures by enhancing their understanding of the driving styles of different demographic groups and the causes of collisions. Second, the models developed to predict the acceleration of both the ego-vehicle and the leading vehicle will provide enough information to explain the behavior of the ego-driver.Includes bibliographical references

CPSOR-GCN: A Vehicle Trajectory Prediction Method Powered by Emotion and Cognitive Theory

Active safety systems on vehicles often face problems with false alarms. Most active safety systems predict the driver's trajectory with the assumption that the driver is always in a normal emotion, and then infer risks. However, the driver's trajectory uncertainty increases under abnormal emotions. This paper proposes a new trajectory prediction model: CPSOR-GCN, which predicts vehicle trajectories under abnormal emotions. At the physical level, the interaction features between vehicles are extracted by the physical GCN module. At the cognitive level, SOR cognitive theory is used as prior knowledge to build a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) structure. The conditional probability and state transition probability of nodes from the calibrated SOR-DBN quantify the causal relationship between cognitive factors, which is embedded into the cognitive GCN module to extract the characteristics of the influence mechanism of emotions on driving behavior. The CARLA-SUMO joint driving simulation platform was built to develop dangerous pre-crash scenarios. Methods of recreating traffic scenes were used to naturally induce abnormal emotions. The experiment collected data from 26 participants to verify the proposed model. Compared with the model that only considers physical motion features, the prediction accuracy of the proposed model is increased by 68.70%. Furthermore,considering the SOR-DBN reduces the prediction error of the trajectory by 15.93%. Compared with other advanced trajectory prediction models, the results of CPSOR-GCN also have lower errors. This model can be integrated into active safety systems to better adapt to the driver's emotions, which could effectively reduce false alarms.Comment: 15 pages, 31 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicle

An ensemble deep learning approach for driver lane change intention inference

With the rapid development of intelligent vehicles, drivers are increasingly likely to share their control authorities with the intelligent control unit. For building an efficient Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and shared-control systems, the vehicle needs to understand the drivers’ intent and their activities to generate assistant and collaborative control strategies. In this study, a driver intention inference system that focuses on the highway lane change maneuvers is proposed. First, a high-level driver intention mechanism and framework are introduced. Then, a vision-based intention inference system is proposed, which captures the multi-modal signals based on multiple low-cost cameras and the VBOX vehicle data acquisition system. A novel ensemble bi-directional recurrent neural network (RNN) model with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units is proposed to deal with the time-series driving sequence and the temporal behavioral patterns. Naturalistic highway driving data that consists of lane-keeping, left and right lane change maneuvers are collected and used for model construction and evaluation. Furthermore, the driver's pre-maneuver activities are statistically analyzed. It is found that for situation-aware, drivers usually check the mirrors for more than six seconds before they initiate the lane change maneuver, and the time interval between steering the handwheel and crossing the lane is about 2 s on average. Finally, hypothesis testing is conducted to show the significant improvement of the proposed algorithm over existing ones. With five-fold cross-validation, the EBiLSTM model achieves an average accuracy of 96.1% for the intention that is inferred 0.5 s before the maneuver starts

Feel the Tire - Tire Influence on Driver’s Handling Assessment

A key question in the development of a tire is "How can this tire improve vehicle handling?" Good handling tires contribute not only to active safety of vehicles, but also to the pleasure of driving. Handling performance is largely determined by the driver. Therefore, the final and most important handling assessment of tires is done by professional test drivers driving on a handling circuit and giving their subjective opinion. This provides the tire manufacturer with the important tire handling performance, but it gives limited information on what the driver perceives as good and how his opinion is formed; the driver is still a 'black box'. Three methods, all based on field experiments, for gaining this knowledge about subjective assessments were chosen for this research. They have in common that they predict the driver's subjective assessment of tire handling, based on vehicle dynamics measurements. The differences lie in the way they derive and utilize these measurements. For method 1, the prediction is done with a General Regression Neural Network based on vehicle dynamics measurements. With this method, several limitations for using regression for tire handling can be circumvented.Method 2 focuses on the driver's workload as an indication for his subjective assessment. This method derives from the fact that the driver adapts to changing vehicle handling behavior. Method 3 also focuses on the driver but not by looking at measures from 'outside' the driver, like workload measures, but by modeling the driver behavior during closed-loop driver-vehicle simulations and looking at driver parameters 'inside' the driver (model).  The results show that all three methods can predict the driver's opinion about tire handling, based on vehicle dynamics measures. Analysis of the relevant measures for the prediction of methods 1 and 2, provides information on the 'what'-question. Likewise, method 3 provides information on the 'how'-question. In addition, drivers adapting behavior, e.g., compensating for less good handling tires by investing more effort, can be quantified with the mental workload measures. This makes them good indicators of driver's perceived tire handling behavior, even when the performance measures do not show differences. For implementation of one or more methods, only a subset of the vehicle dynamics measurements used for this research is needed. During use, the methods can be adapted to changing tire testing methods, with different measurements, handling aspects or maneuvers. When vehicle and tire models are available, these methods can also be used for virtual testing, predicting driver's opinion on tire handling. This research provides a first step in opening up the 'black box' of the driver by quantifying the driver's tire feeling.