Denoising Recurrent Neural Networks for Classifying Crash-Related Events

With detailed sensor and visual data from automobiles, a data-driven model can learn to classify crash-related events during a drive. We propose a neural network model accepting time-series vehicle sensor data and forward-facing videos as input for learning classification of crash-related events and varying types of such events. To elaborate, a novel recurrent neural network structure is introduced, namely, denoising gated recurrent unit with decay, in order to deal with time-series automobile sensor data with missing value and noises. Our model detects crash and near-crash events based on a large set of time-series data collected from naturalistic driving behavior. Furthermore, the model classifies those events involving pedestrians, a vehicle in front, or a vehicle on either side. The effectiveness of our model is evaluated with more than two thousand 30-s clips from naturalistic driving behavior data. The results show that the model, including sensory encoder with denoising gated recurrent unit with decay, visual encoder, and attention mechanism, outperforms gated recurrent unit with decay, gated CNN, and other baselines not only in event classification and but also in event-type classification.