A new modeling approach for predicting vehicle-based safety threats

Existing autonomous driving systems of intelligent vehicles such as advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) assess and quantify the level of potential safety threats. However, they may not be able to plan the best response to unexpected dangerous situations and do not have the ability to cope with uncertainties since not all vehicles can always keep a safe gap from preceding vehicles and drive at a desired velocity. Previous research has not taken such uncertainties into account, it is, therefore, necessary to develop models which are not restricted by the predefined movement patterns of a vehicle. Existing systems are based on a model that estimates the threat level based only on one factor Time-To-Collision (TTC). This approach is limited since it cannot handle all scenarios and ignores all uncertainties. To overcome these limitations, this paper utilised deep learning to develop a range of models that rely on a group of factors to reliably estimate the threat level and predict conflicts under uncertainty using the concept of looming '. Comparative analyses were undertaken by incorporating new varying input factors to each model (e.g., surrogate safety measures, vehicle kinematics, macroscopic traffic data). Real-world experiments demonstrated that adding new factors increases the reliability and sensitivity of the models. Results also indicated that the models that consider looming provide low false alarm rate extending their applications for a wider spectrum of traffic scenarios. This is paramount for ADAS as uncertainties are inherent in the deployment of connected and autonomous vehicles in a mixed traffic stream.