Combining behavior and situation information for reliably estimating multiple intentions

Intersections are the most accident-prone spots in the road network. In order to assist the driver in complex urban intersection situations, an ADAS will be required not only to recognize current but also to anticipate future maneuvers of the involved road users. Current approaches for intention estimation focus mainly on discerning only two intentions based on a vehicle's behavior. We argue that for distinguishing between more than two intentions not just a vehicle's kinematic behavior but also its driving situation needs to be taken into account. In our system we estimate four different intentions by modeling and recognizing driving situations in a Bayesian Network and using the behavior as additional evidence. For the behavior based estimation we present a newly engineered feature, the Anticipated Velocity at Stop line, that turned out to be a very strong indicator for the intention. Our system is evaluated on a real-world data set comprising approaches to seven different intersections on which we can show that our approach is able to estimate a driver's intention with a high accuracy.