Real‐time driving style classification based on short‐term observations

Vehicle behaviour prediction provides important information for decision-making in modern intelligent transportation systems. People with different driving styles have considerably different driving behaviours and hence exhibit different behaviour tendency. However, most existing prediction methods do not consider the different tendencies in driving styles and apply the same model to all vehicles. Furthermore, most of the existing driver classification methods rely on offline learning that requires a long observation of driving history and hence are not suitable for real-time driving behaviour analysis. To facilitate personalised models that can potentially improve vehicle behaviour prediction, the authors propose an algorithm that classifies drivers into different driving styles. The algorithm only requires data from a short observation window and it is more applicable for real-time online applications compared with existing methods that require a long term observation. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve consistent classification results and provide intuitive interpretation and statistical characteristics of different driving styles, which can be further used for vehicle behaviour prediction.