Lane-Change Intention Prediction of Surrounding Vehicles Using BiLSTM-CRF Models with Rule Embedding

Predicting lane-change intentions of surrounding vehicles can effectively help autonomous vehicles reduce collisions caused by lane changes and ensure driving safety. Because prediction methods based on black-box models will lead to passengers' distrust of machine prediction, the intention prediction methods used to autonomous driving need to be interpretable and trustworthy. This paper presents a method for intention prediction of surrounding vehicles by using a bidirectional long short term memory network (BiLSTM) with a conditional random field (CRF) layer above it. Compared with intention prediction methods using deep network, the proposed method can find the features that contribute most to the prediction, thereby improving the interpretability and ensuring the prediction performance. In addition, by employing the transfer characteristic of the CRF layer, traffic rules and the experience of skilled drivers can be embedded to the prediction in the form of rules. Use rules to constrain the intention prediction, thereby improving the trustworthiness of prediction results. Test results on naturalistic driving dataset show that the proposed method can predict the lane-change intention with an accuracy of 97.22%, which is higher than that of Bi-LSTM.