Continuous Car Driving Intent Detection Using Structural Pattern Recognition

The early detection of a driver's intention prior to the initiation of actual maneuvering is to offer effective means of assisting the driver in times of safety. Conventional approaches in predicting a driver's intention include framing the motion parameters of the car and driver as well as the eye gaze sequence of the driver into the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for analysis. However, their power of describing driver behavior is not only limited but also their performance, indicated by the recognition rate relative to the amount of preceding time in early detection, is not satisfactory and needs further improvement. This paper presents an approach for early detection of a driver's intention by modeling and analyzing driver behavior by using structural pattern recognition based on context-free and context-sensitive grammars. We specifically structured a sequence of the driver's eye fixations as well as of the vehicle speed, steering angle and signaling into a sequence of symbolic vectors to form sentences representing a specific driver behavior. It turns out that the proposed approach resulted in an average of 70.5% and 80% recognition rates at the respective 2 and 1 second preceding time to the actual initiation of maneuvering behavior. This performance can be compared to 56.8% and 69% by the state-of-the-art conventional results.