Deep RNN Based Prediction of Driver's Intended Movements at Intersection Using Cooperative Awareness Messages

This paper presents an early prediction framework to classify drivers' intended intersection movements in a connected vehicle environment. Intersections are considered accident blackspots with major traffic violations that cause property damage, injuries and fatalities. An accurate perception of drivers' intended movements at intersections is required for advanced red-light (ARLW) or turning warnings for vulnerable road users (TWVR). Early prediction of intersection movement and adequate warning assistance will ensure road users' safety at the intersection. In this study, we adopted recurrent neural networks (RNN): long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent units (GRU) networks to predict driver intended movements at intersections using the vehicle kinematics extracted from the Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs). We used naturalistic driving data of the Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot (ICVP) project, Queensland, which was collected from 351 participants who drove their connected vehicles during the pilot period. The pilot study installed roadside equipment at 29 signalised intersections to enable the Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System (C-ITS) use cases. Vehicle speed, speed limit, longitudinal acceleration, lateral acceleration, and yaw rate are used as predictors and monitored in 100-millisecond intervals for 1s to 4s at different warning distances from the stop line. Separate prediction models are trained based on different monitoring windows. Furthermore, drivers' intended intersection movements are predicted at two individual intersections to evaluate intersection-specific prediction performance and are found with improved prediction accuracy than overall prediction models trained with all 29 intersections data. Overall prediction models are useful for some intersections which lack available data for individual intersection-based prediction.