Vehicle Path Prediction Using Recurrent Neural Network

Abstract: Vehicle Path Prediction can be used to support Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) that covers different technologies like Autonomous Braking System, Adaptive Cruise Control, etc. In this thesis, the vehicle’s future path, parameterized as 5 coordinates along the path, is predicted by using only visual data collected by a front vision sensor. This approach provides cheaper application opportunities without using different sensors. The predictions are done by deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) and the goal of the project is to use recurrent neural networks (RNN) and to investigate the benefits of using reccurence to the task. Two different approaches are used for the models. The first approach is a single-frame approach that makes predictions by using only one image frame as input and predicts the future location points of the car. The single-frame approach is the baseline model. The second approach is a sequential approach that enables the network the usage of historical information of previous image frames in order to predict the vehicle’s future path for the current frame. With this approach, the effect of using recurrence is investigated. Moreover, uncertainty is important for the model reliability. Having a small uncertainty in most of the predictions or having a high uncertainty in unfamiliar situations for the model will increase success of the model. In this project, the uncertainty estimation approach is based on capturing the uncertainty by following a method that allows to work on deep learning models. The uncertainty approach uses the same models that are defined by the first two approaches. Finally, the evaluation of the approaches are done by the mean absolute error and defining two different reasonable tolerance levels for the distance between the prediction path and the ground truth path. The difference between two tolerance levels is that the first one is a strict tolerance level and the the second one is a more relaxed tolerance level. When using strict tolerance level based on distances on test data, 36% of the predictions are accepted for single-frame model, 48% for the sequential model, 27% and 13% are accepted for single-frame and sequential models of uncertainty models. When using relaxed tolerance level on test data, 60% of the predictions are accepted by single-frame model, 67% for the sequential model, 65% and 53% are accepted for single-frame and sequential models of uncertainty models. Furthermore, by using stored information for each sequence, the methods are evaluated for different conditions such as day/night, road type and road cover. As a result, the sequential model outperforms in the majority of the evaluation results.