Long-Term Prediction of Lane Change Maneuver Through a Multilayer Perceptron

Behavior prediction plays an essential role in both autonomous driving systems and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), since it enhances vehicle's awareness of the imminent hazards in the surrounding environment. Many existing lane change prediction models take as input lateral or angle information and make short-term (< 5 seconds) maneuver predictions. In this study, we propose a longer-term (5~10 seconds) prediction model without any lateral or angle information. Three prediction models are introduced, including a logistic regression model, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model, and a recurrent neural network (RNN) model, and their performances are compared by using the real-world NGSIM dataset. To properly label the trajectory data, this study proposes a new time-window labeling scheme by adding a time gap between positive and negative samples. Two approaches are also proposed to address the unstable prediction issue, where the aggressive approach propagates each positive prediction for certain seconds, while the conservative approach adopts a roll-window average to smooth the prediction. Evaluation results show that the developed prediction model is able to capture 75% of real lane change maneuvers with an average advanced prediction time of 8.05 seconds.