A Method for Vehicle Collision Risk Assessment through Inferring Driver's Braking Actions in Near-Crash Situations

Driving information and data under potential vehicle crashes create opportunities for extensive real-world observations of driver behaviors and relevant factors that significantly influence the driving safety in emergency scenarios. Furthermore, the availability of such data also enhances the collision avoidance systems (CASs) by evaluating driver's actions in near-crash scenarios and providing timely warnings. These applications motivate the need for heuristic tools capable of inferring relationship among driving risk, driver/vehicle characteristics, and road environment. In this paper, we acquired amount of real-world driving data and built a comprehensive dataset, which contains multiple "driver-vehicle-road" attributes. The proposed method works in two steps. In the first step, a variable precision rough set (VPRS) based classification technique is applied to draw a reduced core subset from field driving dataset, which presents the essential attributes set most relevant to driving safety assessment. In the second step, we design a decision strategy by introducing mutual information entropy to quantify the significance of each attribute, then a representative index through accumulation of weighted "driver-vehicle-road" factors is calculated to reflect the driving risk for actual situation. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated in an offline analysis of the driving data collected in field trials, where the aim is to infer the emergency braking actions in next short term. The results indicate that our proposed model is a good alternative for providing improved warnings in real-time because of its high prediction accuracy and stability.