Identification of Lane-Change Maneuvers in Real-World Drivings With Hidden Markov Model and Dynamic Time Warping

For the introduction of new automated driving functions, the systems need to be verified extensively. A scenario-driven approach has become an accepted method for this task. But, to verify the functionality of an automated vehicle in the simulation in a certain scenario such as a lane-change, relevant characteristic of scenarios need to be identified. That, however, requires to extract these scenarios from real-world drivings accurately. For that purpose, this work proposes a novel framework based on a set of unsupervised learning methods to identify lane-changes on motorways. To represent various types of lane-changes, the maneuver is split up into primitive driving actions with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Divisive Hierarchical Clustering (DHC). Based on this, lane-change maneuvers are identified using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). The presented framework is evaluated with a real-world test drive and compared to other baseline methods. With a F
₁
score of 98.01% in lane-change identification, the presented approach shows promising results.