A support vector machine approach to unintentional vehicle lane departure prediction

Advanced driver assistance systems, such as unintentional lane departure warning systems, have recently drawn much attention and R & D efforts. Such a system may assist the driver by monitoring the driver or vehicle behaviors to predict/detect driving situations (e.g, lane departure) and alert the driver to take corrective action. In this paper, we show how the support vector machine (SVM) methodology can potentially provide enhanced unintentional lane departure prediction, which is a new method relative to literature. Our binary SVM employed the Radial Basis Function kernel to classify time series of select vehicle variables. The SVM was trained and tested using the driver experiment data generated by VIRTTEX, a hydraulically powered 6-degrees-of-freedom moving base driving simulator at Ford Motor Company. The data that we used represented 16 drowsy subjects (three-hour driving time per subject) and six control subjects (20 minutes driving per subject), all of which drove a simulated 2000 Volvo S80. The vehicle variables were all sampled at 50 Hz. There were a total of 3,508 unintentional lane departure occurrences for the drowsy drivers and only 23 for four of the six control drivers (two had none). The SVM was trained by over 60,000 time series examples (the actual number depended on the prediction horizon) created from 50% of the lane departures. The training data were removed from the testing data. During the testing, the SVM made a lane departure prediction at every sampling time for every one of the 22 drivers (over 6.8 million predictions in total). The overall sensitivity and specificity of the SVM with a 0.2-second prediction horizon for the 22 drivers were 99.77465% and 99.99997%, respectively. The SVM predicted, on average 0.200181 seconds in advance, lane departure correctly for all the control drivers, but missed 4 of the 1,758 and gave false positives for another 2 for the drowsy drivers. For the prediction horizon of 0.4s, there was 1 false positive case for the control subjects, and the false negative and false positive cases rose substantially to 10 and 137 for the drowsy drivers, respectively.