Vehicle Trajectory Estimation Based on Fusion of Visual Motion Features and Deep Learning

Driver situation awareness is critical for safety. In this paper, we propose a fast, accurate method for obtaining real-time situation awareness using a single type of sensor: monocular cameras. The system tracks the host vehicle’s trajectory using sparse optical flow and tracks vehicles in the surrounding environment using convolutional neural networks. Optical flow is used to measure the linear and angular velocity of the host vehicle. The convolutional neural networks are used to measure target vehicles’ positions relative to the host vehicle using image-based detections. Finally, the system fuses host and target vehicle trajectories in the world coordinate system using the velocity of the host vehicle and the target vehicles’ relative positions with the aid of an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). We implement and test our model quantitatively in simulation and qualitatively on real-world test video. The results show that the algorithm is superior to state-of-the-art sequential state estimation methods such as visual SLAM in performing accurate global localization and trajectory estimation for host and target vehicles.