A method based on Vision Transformer and multiple image information for vehicle lane-changing recognition in mixed traffic and connected environment

To enhance the safety of autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic and connected environment, it is crucial to recognize the lane-changing intentions (LCIs) of human-driven vehicles for autonomous vehicles. This paper presents a novel method for LCI recognition, which extracts features from the driving state and relative motion of the target vehicle and its neighbors. The method applies short-time Fourier transform, Gramian angular summation field, and Gramian angular difference field to the time-series data, and generates three grayscale images, which are merged into one information fusion image (IFI) by image processing techniques. The IFIs are then classified into three categories: lane keeping, lane-changing left, and lane-changing right, using the Vision Transformer model with transfer learning to speed up convergence and reduce training cost. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the traditional methods, achieving an accuracy of 95.65% for recognizing LCI 3s before the lane change point.