text: Anticipating possible behaviors of traffic participants is an essential capability of autonomous vehicles. Many behavior detection and maneuver recognition methods only have a very limited prediction horizon that leaves inadequate time and space for planning. To avoid unsatisfactory reactive decisions, it is essential to count long-term future rewards in planning, which requires extending the prediction horizon. In this paper, we uncover that clues to vehicle behaviors over an extended horizon can be found in vehicle interaction, which makes it possible to anticipate the likelihood of a certain behavior, even in the absence of any clear maneuver pattern. We adopt a recurrent neural network (RNN) for observation encoding, and based on that, we propose a novel vehicle behavior interaction network (VBIN) to capture the vehicle interaction from the hidden states and connection feature of each interaction pair. The output of our method is a probabilistic likelihood of multiple behavior classes, which matches the multimodal and uncertain nature of the distant future. A systematic comparison of our method against two state-of-the-art methods and another two baseline methods on a publicly available real highway dataset is provided, showing that our method has superior accuracy and advanced capability for interaction modeling.
  @cite_1: We propose a new detection method to predict a vehicle's trajectory and use it for detecting lane changes of surrounding vehicles. According to the previous research, more than 90 of the car crashes are caused by human errors, and lane changes are the main factor. Therefore, if a lane change can be detected before a vehicle crosses the centerline, accident rates will decrease. Previously reported detection methods have the problem of frequent false alarms caused by zigzag driving that can result in user distrust in driving safety support systems. Most cases of zigzag driving are caused by the abortion of a lane change due to the presence of adjacent vehicles on the next lane. Our approach reduces false alarms by considering the possibility of a crash with adjacent vehicles by applying trajectory prediction when the target vehicle attempts to change a lane, and it reflects the result of lane-change detection. We used a traffic dataset with more than 500 lane changes and confirmed that the proposed method can considerably improve the detection performance.
  @cite_13: Driving is a complex task that requires constant attention, and intelligent transportation systems that support drivers in this task must continually infer driver intentions to produce reasonable, safe responses. In this paper we describe a technique for inferring driver intentions, specifically the intention to change lanes, using support vector machines (SVMs). The technique was applied to experimental data from an instrumented vehicle that included both behavioral data and environmental data. Comparing these results to recent results using a novel “mind-tracking” technique, we found that SVMs outperformed earlier algorithms and proved especially effective in early detection of driver lane changes.
  @cite_3: Risk estimation for the current traffic situation is crucial for safe autonomous driving systems. One part of the uncertainty in risk estimation is the behavior of the surrounding traffic participants. In this paper we focus on highway scenarios, where possible behaviors consist of a change in acceleration and lane change maneuvers. We present a novel approach for the recognition of lane change intentions of traffic participants. Our novel approach is an extension of the Naive Bayesian approach and results in a generative model. It builds on the relations to the directly surrounding vehicles and to the static traffic environment. We obtain the conditional probabilities of all relevant features using Gaussian mixtures with a flexible number of components. We systematically reduce the number of features by selecting the most powerful ones. Furthermore we investigate the predictive power of each feature with respect to the time before a lane change event. In a large scale experiment on real world data with over 160.781 samples collected on a test drive of 1100km we trained and validated our intention prediction model and achieved a significant improvement in the recognition performance of lane change intentions compared to current state of the art methods.
  @cite_8: Predicting other traffic participants trajectories is a crucial task for an autonomous vehicle, in order to avoid collisions on its planned trajectory. It is also necessary for many Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, where the ego-vehicle's trajectory has to be predicted too. Even if trajectory prediction is not a deterministic task, it is possible to point out the most likely trajectory. This paper presents a new trajectory prediction method which combines a trajectory prediction based on Constant Yaw Rate and Acceleration motion model and a trajectory prediction based on maneuver recognition. It takes benefit on the accuracy of both predictions respectively a short-term and long-term. The defined Maneuver Recognition Module selects the current maneuver from a predefined set by comparing the center lines of the road's lanes to a local curvilinear model of the path of the vehicle. The overall approach was tested on prerecorded human real driving data and results show that the Maneuver Recognition Module has a high success rate and that the final trajectory prediction has a better accuracy.
summary: Detection-based methods, such as maneuver recognition approaches, have been studied extensively. Houenou @cite_8 identify maneuver patterns such as LK and LC based on a handcrafted model which evaluates the similarity between the vehicle trajectory and lane center line. However, user-specified parameters and thresholds are required. Mandalia @cite_13 classify the LC maneuver using support vector machine (SVM), while Schlechitriemen @cite_3 use Gaussian mixture models to estimate driving intentions. Woo @cite_1 also adopt an SVM, and suggest using trajectory prediction to reject false alarms from the intention estimations. These methods detect LCs based on the target's own maneuver pattern and only have a limited prediction horizon. In contrast, our method captures the driver intention, even in the absence of any clear maneuver pattern, by making use of the vehicle behavior interactions.