Probabilistic situation assessment framework for multiple, interacting traffic participants in generic traffic scenes

Situation recognition is a prerequisite for many advanced driver assistance systems as well as for partially and fully automated vehicles. Current situation recognition approaches focus mainly on estimating maneuvers of single scene entities. However, assessing multiple, possibly interacting, traffic participants simultaneously is crucial in complex traffic scenes and has hardly been investigated. Considering the variability and combinatorics of such scenarios, having specialized situation recognition systems covering each case directly is unrealistic. In this paper, we present a flexible framework for assessing generic traffic scenes with multiple interacting traffic participants. It is able to construct a fully interaction-respecting probabilistic situation assessment, while relying on reusable state-of-the-art single-entity-based maneuver predictions. The benefits and applicability are presented on a real-world data set. The evaluation indicates that the approach is not only able to reconstruct underlying interdependent probability distributions; it outperforms specially designed models, due to the reduced complexities of the single-entity-based recognition models.