Lane change is a very demanding driving task and number of traffic accidents are induced by mistaken maneuvers. An automated lane change system has the potential to reduce driver workload and to improve driving safety. One challenge is how to improve driver acceptance on the automated system. From the viewpoint of human factors, an automated system with different styles would improve user acceptance as the drivers can adapt the style to different driving situations. This paper proposes a method to design different lane change styles in automated driving by analysis and modeling of truck driver behavior. A truck driving simulator experiment with 12 participants was conducted to identify the driver model parameters and three lane change styles were classified as the aggressive, medium, and conservative ones. The proposed automated lane change system was evaluated by another truck driving simulator experiment with the same 12 participants. Moreover, the effect of different driving styles on driver experience and acceptance was evaluated. The evaluation results demonstrate that the different lane change styles could be distinguished by the drivers; meanwhile, the three styles were overall evaluated as acceptable on safety issues and reliable by the human drivers. This study provides insight into designing the automated driving system with different driving styles and the findings can be applied to commercial automated trucks.
Existing inpainting methods have achieved promising performance in recovering defected images of specific scenes. However, filling holes involving multiple semantic categories remains challenging due to the obscure semantic boundaries and the mixture of different semantic textures. In this paper, we introduce coherence priors between the semantics and textures which make it possible to concentrate on completing separate textures in a semantic-wise manner. Specifically, we adopt a multi-scale joint optimization framework to first model the coherence priors and then accordingly interleavingly optimize image inpainting and semantic segmentation in a coarse-to-fine manner. A Semantic-Wise Attention Propagation (SWAP) module is devised to refine completed image textures across scales by exploring non-local semantic coherence, which effectively mitigates mix-up of textures. We also propose two coherence losses to constrain the consistency between the semantics and the inpainted image in terms of the overall structure and detailed textures. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method for challenging cases with complex holes.
Re-identification (re-ID) is currently investigated as a closed-world image retrieval task, and evaluated by retrieval based metrics. The algorithms return ranking lists to users, but cannot tell which images are the true target. In essence, current re-ID overemphasizes the importance of retrieval but underemphasizes that of verification, \textit{i.e.}, all returned images are considered as the target. On the other hand, re-ID should also include the scenario that the query identity does not appear in the gallery. To this end, we go back to the essence of re-ID, \textit{i.e.}, a combination of retrieval and verification in an open-set setting, and put forward a new metric, namely, Genuine Open-set re-ID Metric (GOM). GOM explicitly balances the effect of performing retrieval and verification into a single unified metric. It can also be decomposed into a family of sub-metrics, enabling a clear analysis of re-ID performance. We evaluate the effectiveness of GOM on the re-ID benchmarks, showing its ability to capture important aspects of re-ID performance that have not been taken into account by established metrics so far. Furthermore, we show GOM scores excellent in aligning with human visual evaluation of re-ID performance. Related codes are available at https://github.com/YuanXinCherry/Person-reID-Evaluation
Haptic guidance in a shared steering assistance system has drawn significant attention in intelligent vehicle fields, owing to its mutual communication ability for vehicle control. By exerting continuous torque on the steering wheel, both the driver and support system can share lateral control of the vehicle. However, current haptic guidance steering systems demonstrate some deficiencies in assisting lane changing. This study explored a new steering interaction method, including the design and evaluation of an intention-based haptic shared steering system. Such an intention-based method can support both lane keeping and lane changing assistance, by detecting a driver lane change intention. By using a deep learning-based method to model a driver decision timing regarding lane crossing, an adaptive gain control method was proposed for realizing a steering control system. An intention consistency method was proposed to detect whether the driver and the system were acting towards the same target trajectories and to accurately capture the driver intention. A driving simulator experiment was conducted to test the system performance. Participants were required to perform six trials with assistive methods and one trial without assistance. The results demonstrated that the supporting system decreased the lane departure risk in the lane keeping tasks and could support a fast and stable lane changing maneuver.
In this article, the authors present a novel method to learn the personalized tactic of discretionary lane-change initiation for fully autonomous vehicles through human-computer interactions. Instead of learning from human-driving demonstrations, a reinforcement learning technique is employed to learn how to initiate lane changes from traffic context, the action of a self-driving vehicle, and in-vehicle user feedback. The proposed offline algorithm rewards the action-selection strategy when the user gives positive feedback and penalizes it when negative feedback. Also, a multi-dimensional driving scenario is considered to represent a more realistic lane-change trade-off. The results show that the lane-change initiation model obtained by this method can reproduce the personal lane-change tactic, and the performance of the customized models (average accuracy 86.1%) is much better than that of the non-customized models (average accuracy 75.7%). This method allows continuous improvement of customization for users during fully autonomous driving even without human-driving experience, which will significantly enhance the user acceptance of high-level autonomy of self-driving vehicles.
Cross-modal matching has been a highlighted research topic in both vision and language areas. Learning appropriate mining strategy to sample and weight informative pairs is crucial for the cross-modal matching performance. However, most existing metric learning methods are developed for unimodal matching, which is unsuitable for cross-modal matching on multimodal data with heterogeneous features. To address this problem, we propose a simple and interpretable universal weighting framework for cross-modal matching, which provides a tool to analyze the interpretability of various loss functions. Furthermore, we introduce a new polynomial loss under the universal weighting framework, which defines a weight function for the positive and negative informative pairs respectively. Experimental results on two image-text matching benchmarks and two video-text matching benchmarks validate the efficacy of the proposed method.
For the optimum design of a driver-automation shared control system, an understanding of driver behavior based on measurements and modeling is crucial early in the development process. This paper presents a driver model through a weighting process of visual guidance from the road ahead and haptic guidance from a steering system for a lane-following task. The proposed weighting process describes the interaction of a driver with the haptic guidance steering and the driver reliance on it. A driving simulator experiment is conducted to identify the model parameters for driving manually and with haptic guidance. The proposed driver model matched the driver input torque with a satisfactory goodness of fit among fourteen participants after considering the individual differences. The validation results reveal that the simulated trajectory effectively followed the driving course by matching the measured trajectory, thereby indicating that the proposed driver model is capable of predicting driver behavior during haptic guidance. Furthermore, the effect of different degrees of driver reliance on driving performance is evaluated considering various driver states and with system failure via numerical analysis. The model evaluation results reveal the potential of the proposed driver model to be applied in the design and evaluation of a haptic guidance system.
With the increasing popularity of graph-based learning, graph neural networks (GNNs) emerge as the essential tool for gaining insights from graphs. However, unlike the conventional CNNs that have been extensively explored and exhaustively tested, people are still worrying about the GNNs' robustness under the critical settings, such as financial services. The main reason is that existing GNNs usually serve as a black-box in predicting and do not provide the uncertainty on the predictions. On the other side, the recent advancement of Bayesian deep learning on CNNs has demonstrated its success of quantifying and explaining such uncertainties to fortify CNN models. Motivated by these observations, we propose UAG, the first systematic solution to defend adversarial attacks on GNNs through identifying and exploiting hierarchical uncertainties in GNNs. UAG develops a Bayesian Uncertainty Technique (BUT) to explicitly capture uncertainties in GNNs and further employs an Uncertainty-aware Attention Technique (UAT) to defend adversarial attacks on GNNs. Intensive experiments show that our proposed defense approach outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions by a significant margin.
Shared steering control has been developed to reduce driver workload while keeping the driver in the control loop. A driver could integrate visual sensory information from the road ahead and haptic sensory information from the steering wheel to achieve better driving performance. Previous studies suggest that, compared with adaptive automation authority, fixed automation authority is not always appropriate with respect to human factors. This paper focuses on designing an adaptive shared steering control system via sEMG (surface electromyography) measurement from the forearm of the driver, and evaluates the effect of the system on driver behavior during a double lane change task. The shared steering control was achieved through a haptic guidance system which provided active assistance torque on the steering wheel. Ten subjects participated in a high-fidelity driving simulator experiment. Two types of adaptive algorithms were investigated: haptic guidance decreases when driver grip strength increases (HG-Decrease), and haptic guidance increases when driver grip strength increases (HG-Increase). These two algorithms were compared to manual driving and two levels of fixed authority haptic guidance, for a total of five experimental conditions. Evaluation of the driving systems was based on two sets of dependent variables: objective measures of driver behavior and subjective measures of driver workload. The results indicate that the adaptive authority of HG-Decrease yielded lower driver workload and reduced the lane departure risk compared to manual driving and fixed authority haptic guidance.
Removing rain streaks from rainy images is necessary for many tasks in computer vision, such as object detection and recognition. It needs to address two mutually exclusive objectives: removing rain streaks and reserving realistic details. Balancing them is critical for de-raining methods. We propose an end-to-end network, called dual-task de-raining network (DTDN), consisting of two sub-networks: generative adversarial network (GAN) and convolutional neural network (CNN), to remove rain streaks via coordinating the two mutually exclusive objectives self-adaptively. DTDN-GAN is mainly used to remove structural rain streaks, and DTDN-CNN is designed to recover details in original images. We also design a training algorithm to train these two sub-networks of DTDN alternatively, which share same weights but use different training sets. We further enrich two existing datasets to approximate the distribution of real rain streaks. Experimental results show that our method outperforms several recent state-of-the-art methods, based on both benchmark testing datasets and real rainy images.