A comparative exploration of eye gaze and head motion cues for lane change intent prediction

Driver behavioral cues may present a rich source of information and feedback for future intelligent driver assistance systems (IDAS). Two of the most useful cues might be eye gaze and head motion. Eye gaze provides a more accurate proxy than head motion for determining driver attention, whereas the measurement of head motion head motion as a derivative of pose is less cumbersome and more reliable in harsh driving conditions. With the design of a simple and robust IDAS in mind, we are interested in determining the most important driver cues for distinguishing driver intent. We use a lane change intent prediction system 1 to determine the relative usefulness of each cue for determining intent. Various combinations of input data are presented to a discriminative classifier, which is trained to output a prediction of probable lane change maneuver at a particular point in the future. Quantitative results using real-world data are presented and show that head motion, when combined with lane position and vehicle dynamics, is a reliable cue for lane change intent prediction. The addition of eye gaze does not improve performance as much as simpler head pose-based cues.