Using Dual Attention BiLSTM to Predict Vehicle Lane Changing Maneuvers on Highway Dataset

Abstract

In this research, we address the problem of accurately predicting lane-change maneuvers on highways. Lane-change maneuvers are a critical aspect of highway safety and traffic flow, and the accurate prediction of these maneuvers can have significant implications for both. However, current methods for lane-change prediction are limited in their ability to handle naturalistic driving scenarios and often require large amounts of labeled data. Our proposed model uses a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) network to analyze naturalistic vehicle trajectories recorded from multiple sensors on German highways. To handle the temporal aspect of vehicle behavior, we utilized a sliding window approach, considering both the preceding and following vehicles’ trajectories. To tackle class imbalances in the data, we introduced rolling mean computed weights. Our extensive feature engineering process resulted in a comprehensive feature set to train the model. The proposed model fills the gap in the state-of-the-art lane change prediction methods and can be applied in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving systems. Our results show that the BiLSTM-based approach with the sliding window technique effectively predicts lane changes with 86% test accuracy and a test loss of 0.325 by considering the context of the input data in both the past and future. The F1 score of 0.52, precision of 0.41, recall of 0.75, accuracy of 0.86, and AUC of 0.81 also demonstrate the model’s high ability to distinguish between the two target classes. Furthermore, the model achieved an accuracy of 83.65% with a loss value of 0.3306 on the other half of the data samples, and the validation accuracy was observed to improve over these epochs, reaching the highest validation accuracy of 92.53%. The F1 score of 0.51, precision of 0.36, recall of 0.89, accuracy of 0.82, and AUC of 0.85 on this data sample also demonstrate the model’s strong ability to identify both positive and negative classes. Overall, our proposed approach outperforms existing methods and can significantly contribute to improving highway safety and traffic flow.