Vehicle Interaction Behavior Prediction with Self-Attention

The structured road is a scene with high interaction between vehicles, but due to the high uncertainty of behavior, the prediction of vehicle interaction behavior is still a challenge. This prediction is significant for controlling the ego-vehicle. We propose an interaction behavior prediction model based on vehicle cluster (VC) by self-attention (VC-Attention) to improve the prediction performance. Firstly, a five-vehicle based cluster structure is designed to extract the interactive features between ego-vehicle and target vehicle, such as Deceleration Rate to Avoid a Crash (DRAC) and the lane gap. In addition, the proposed model utilizes the sliding window algorithm to extract VC behavior information. Then the temporal characteristics of the three interactive features mentioned above will be caught by two layers of self-attention encoder with six heads respectively. Finally, target vehicle’s future behavior will be predicted by a sub-network consists of a fully connected layer and SoftMax module. The experimental results show that this method has achieved accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of more than 92% and time to event of 2.9 s on a Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) dataset. It accurately predicts the interactive behaviors in class-imbalance prediction and adapts to various driving scenarios.