Prediction of Lane-Changing Maneuvers with Automatic Labeling and Deep Learning

<jats:p> Highway safety has attracted significant research interest in recent years, especially as innovative technologies such as connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are fast becoming a reality. Identification and prediction of driving intention are fundamental for avoiding collisions as it can provide useful information to drivers and vehicles in their vicinity. However, the state-of-the-art in maneuver prediction requires the utilization of large labeled datasets, which demand a significant amount of processing and might hinder real-time applications. In this paper, an end-to-end machine learning model for predicting lane-change maneuvers from unlabeled data using a limited number of features is developed and presented. The model is built on a novel comprehensive dataset (i.e., highD) obtained from German highways with camera-equipped drones. Density-based clustering is used to identify lane-changing and lane-keeping maneuvers and a support vector machine (SVM) model is then trained to learn the boundaries of the clustered labels and automatically label the new raw data. The labeled data are then input to a long short-term memory (LSTM) model which is used to predict maneuver class. The classification results show that lane changes can efficiently be predicted in real-time, with an average detection time of at least 3 s with a small percentage of false alarms. The utilization of unlabeled data and vehicle characteristics as features increases the prospects of transferability of the approach and its practical application for highway safety. </jats:p>