An Improved IOHMM-Based Stochastic Driver Lane-Changing Model

The prediction and estimation of the lane-changing state of the host car and surrounding cars are important parts of an advanced driving assistant system, which mainly depend on the understanding of the driver lane-changing behavior. To learn driver lane-changing maneuver well, this article provides a novel stochastic driver lane-changing model based on an improved input–output hidden Markov model (IOHMM) framework. First, an improved IOHMM is proposed to address the deficiency that the traditional IOHMM cannot remember previous data and describe continuous output. Then, based on the improved IOHMM framework, a driver lane-changing model is established considering the intention and behavior of the driver in the lane-changing process. The model parameters can be learned from the collected lane-changing data using the maximum likelihood estimation and generalized estimation-maximization methods. Finally, the model is applied to a real driver lane-changing process. It is verified that the proposed model has good performance in predicting the future motion maneuver of the host vehicle and estimating the current motion state of the surrounding cars.