Lateral and longitudinal driving behavior prediction based on improved deep belief network

Accurately predicting driving behavior can help to avoid potential improper maneuvers of human drivers, thus guaranteeing safe driving for intelligent vehicles. In this paper, we propose a novel deep belief network (DBN), called MSR-DBN, by integrating a multi-target sigmoid regression (MSR) layer with DBN to predict the front wheel angle and speed of the ego vehicle. Precisely, the MSR-DBN consists of two sub-networks: one is for the front wheel angle, and the other one is for speed. This MSR-DBN model allows ones to optimize lateral and longitudinal behavior predictions through a systematic testing method. In addition, we consider the historical states of the ego vehicle and surrounding vehicles and the driver’s operations as inputs to predict driving behaviors in a real-world environment. Comparison of the prediction results of MSR-DBN with a general DBN model, back propagation (BP) neural network, support vector regression (SVR), and radical basis function (RBF) neural network, demonstrates that the proposed MSR-DBN outperforms the others in terms of accuracy and robustness.