An Unsupervised Approach for Inferring Driver Behavior From Naturalistic Driving Data

Intelligent transportation systems are able to collect large volumes of high-resolution data. The amount of data collected by these systems can quickly overwhelm the ability of human analysts to draw meaningful conclusions from the data, particularly in large-scale multivehicle field trials. As advanced driver assistance systems develop, they will also be required to form a rich and high-level understanding of the world from the data they receive, including the behavior of the driver. These applications motivate the need for unsupervised tools capable of forming a high-level summary of low-level driving data. This paper presents an unsupervised method for converting naturalistic driving data into high-level behaviors. The proposed method works in two steps. In the first step, inertial data are automatically decomposed into linear segments. In the second step, the segments are assigned to high-level driving behaviors. The proposed method is computationally efficient and completely unsupervised and requires minimal preprocessing. Although the method is unsupervised, the clusters produced exhibit high-level patterns that can easily be associated with driving behaviors such as braking, turning, accelerating, and coasting. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated in an offline application where the objective is to summarize inertial data into driving behaviors. The method is also demonstrated in an online application where the aim is to infer the current driving behavior using only inertial data. Both experiments were conducted using driving data collected in natural driving conditions.