Attention-Based Event Characterization for Scarce Vehicular Sensing Data

Characterizing risky driving behavior is crucial in a connected vehicle environment, particularly to improve driving experience through enhanced safety features. Artificial intelligence-backed solutions are vital components of the modern transportation. However, such systems require significant volume of driving event data for an acceptable level of performance. To address the issue, this study proposes a novel framework for precise risky driving behavior detection that takes advantage of an attention-based neural network model. The proposed framework aims to recognize five driving events including harsh brake, aggressive acceleration, harsh left turn and harsh right turn alongside the normal driving behavior. Through numerical results, it is shown that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions by reaching an average accuracy of 0.96 and F1-score of 0.92 for all classes of driving events. Thus, it reduces the false positive instances compared to the previous models. Furthermore, through extensive experiments, structural details of the attention-based neural network is investigated to provide the most viable configuration for the analysis of the vehicular sensory data.