Ego-centric traffic behavior understanding through multi-level vehicle trajectory analysis

• Published in: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) pp. 211 - 218
• Main Authors: Donghao Xu, Xu He, Huijing Zhao, Jinshi Cui, Hongbin Zha, Guillemard, Franck, Geronimi, Stephane, Aioun, Francois
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2017
• Subjects: Adaptation models; Analytical models; Hidden Markov models; Predictive models; Trajectory; Vehicle dynamics; Videos
• DOI: 10.1109/ICRA.2017.7989026

This study proposes a multi-level trajectory analysis method for modeling traffic behavior from an ego-centric view, where on-road vehicle trajectories are collected based on the authors' previous studies of an on-board system consisting of multiple 2D lidar sensors. From an input set of trajectories, a set of hot regions (topics) that trajectory points most frequently present are first discovered using a sticky HDP-HMM; then, the major paths of the trajectories' transitions across different hot regions are extracted by recursively mining frequent subsequences of topics; and finally, paths are modeled using a hierarchical hidden Markov model (HHMM), where the intra-path dynamics is represented using an HMM, in which each state corresponds to a hot region, while the inter-path transition is assumed to be Markovian. The model could be used for behavior prediction, i.e. whenever a vehicle is detected in a scene, predicting which route it will probably follow and how its trajectory will probably develop over time, which is essential to interpreting the potential risks for longer time horizons. Experiments are conducted using a large set of vehicle trajectories collected from motorways in Beijing, and promising results are presented.