Camera Based Decision Making at Roundabouts for Autonomous Vehicles

Being able to join roundabouts correctly is crucial for an autonomous vehicle to maintain not only its own safety but also a normal traffic order for others. In order to know the right time and speed for entering roundabouts, the location, speed and direction of the approaching vehicles need to be taken into consideration. This study investigated the feasibility of leveraging computer vision and machine learning to help autonomous vehicles decide to wait or to enter when reaching roundabouts. A grid-based image processing approach with a single camera at normal roundabouts (GBIPA-SC-NR) is proposed in this paper to characterize traffic situations that can be used for machine learning algorithms to learn the roundabout joining criteria. Video road clips recorded when human drivers reach and then join various roundabouts at different locations were utilised for this learning process, with a selection of four supervised classification algorithms (i.e. the Support Vector Machines, Random Forests, K-Nearest Neighbours, and Decision Tree). The trained classifiers using the proposed approach were evaluated on 507 test videos captured at roundabouts, where the SVM showed the best performance with a 90.28% classification accuracy. This result suggests that the proposed grid-based image processing method can be applied to effectively help autonomous vehicles made the right decision when reaching a roundabout.