Driving style estimation by fusing multiple driving behaviors: a case study of freeway in China

Traffic accident is one of the most serious issues in traffic problems. In China, more than 50 thousand people die in each year from traffic accidents. To alleviate the incidence of traffic accidents, this paper proposes a driving style estimation method by fusing multiple driving behaviors for Chinese drivers. Firstly, we invite Chinese volunteers to operate a driving simulator. Massive driving data are collected by the simulator. Then, a driving dataset is set up by the collected data. Furthermore, we adopt the collected driving data to represent behaviors by using SVM. Last but not least, a novel classification method is proposed to estimate driving styles, which is called multiple decision tree. The method can fuse multiple behaviors and explore the relationship between driving styles and behaviors. As a result, 20 volunteers and a freeway in China is selected for case study. After test, the proposed method has a 95% accuracy for style estimation. However, about 25% volunteers have a Risk style and these volunteers should change their driving habits. It also reveals the high incidence of accidents in China. Hence, the proposed method can alert the driver with bad styles and is helpful to ease traffic accidents.