A bayesian approach for driving behavior inference

Human drivers are endowed with an inborn ability to put themselves in the position of other drivers and reason about their behaviors and intended actions. State-of-the-art driving assistance systems, on the other hand, are generally limited to physical models and ad-hoc safety rules. In order to drive safely amongst humans, autonomous vehicles require a high-level description of the state of traffic participants. This paper presents a probabilistic model for estimating and predicting the behavior of drivers immersed in traffic. The model is defined within a stochastic filtering framework and estimation and prediction are carried out with statistical inference techniques. The approach is validated with real data from a fleet of mining vehicles.