학술논문

Early Lane Change Prediction for Automated Driving Systems Using Multi-Task Attention-Based Convolutional Neural Networks
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles IEEE Trans. Intell. Veh. Intelligent Vehicles, IEEE Transactions on. 7(3):758-770 Sep, 2022
Subject
Transportation
Robotics and Control Systems
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
TV
Predictive models
Feature extraction
Convolutional neural networks
Multitasking
Timing
Vehicle dynamics
Vehicle behaviour prediction
automated driving
multi-task learning
curriculum learning
attention mechanism
Language
ISSN
2379-8858
2379-8904
Abstract
Lane change (LC) is one of the safety-critical manoeuvres in highway driving according to various road accident records. Thus, reliably predicting such manoeuvre in advance is critical for the safe and comfortable operation of automated driving systems. The majority of previous studies rely on detecting a manoeuvre that has been already started, rather than predicting the manoeuvre in advance. Furthermore, most of the previous works do not estimate the key timings of the manoeuvre (e.g., crossing time), which can actually yield more useful information for the decision making in the ego vehicle. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes a novel multi-task model to simultaneously estimate the likelihood of LC manoeuvres and the time-to-lane-change (TTLC). In both tasks, an attention-based convolutional neural network (CNN) is used as a shared feature extractor from a bird’s eye view representation of the driving environment. The spatial attention used in the CNN model improves the feature extraction process by focusing on the most relevant areas of the surrounding environment. In addition, two novel curriculum learning schemes are employed to train the proposed approach. The extensive evaluation and comparative analysis of the proposed method in existing benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art LC prediction models, particularly considering long-term prediction performance.