An Automated Analysis Framework for Trajectory Datasets
This work addresses the need for objective comparison of trajectory datasets for researchers and practitioners in automated vehicle safety, though it is incremental as it builds on existing detection methods.
The authors tackled the problem of comparing large trajectory datasets for automated vehicle safety validation by proposing an automated analysis framework that derives quantitative scores for interaction, anomaly, and relevance, enabling objective dataset comparisons and deeper insights into road user behavior.
Trajectory datasets of road users have become more important in the last years for safety validation of highly automated vehicles. Several naturalistic trajectory datasets with each more than 10.000 tracks were released and others will follow. Considering this amount of data, it is necessary to be able to compare these datasets in-depth with ease to get an overview. By now, the datasets' own provided information is mainly limited to meta-data and qualitative descriptions which are mostly not consistent with other datasets. This is insufficient for users to differentiate the emerging datasets for application-specific selection. Therefore, an automated analysis framework is proposed in this work. Starting with analyzing individual tracks, fourteen elementary characteristics, so-called detection types, are derived and used as the base of this framework. To describe each traffic scenario precisely, the detections are subdivided into common metrics, clustering methods and anomaly detection. Those are combined using a modular approach. The detections are composed into new scores to describe three defined attributes of each track data quantitatively: interaction, anomaly and relevance. These three scores are calculated hierarchically for different abstract layers to provide an overview not just between datasets but also for tracks, spatial regions and individual situations. So, an objective comparison between datasets can be realized. Furthermore, it can help to get a deeper understanding of the recorded infrastructure and its effect on road user behavior. To test the validity of the framework, a study is conducted to compare the scores with human perception. Additionally, several datasets are compared.