Integrating spatial and channel attention mechanisms with domain knowledge in convolutional neural networks for friction coefficient prediction

The pavement skid resistance is crucial for ensuring driving safety. However, the reproducibility and comparability of field measurements are constrained by various influencing factors. One solution to these constraints is utilizing laser‐based 3D pavement data, which are notably stable and can be employed to estimate pavement skid resistance indirectly. However, the integration of tire–road friction mechanisms and deep neural networks has not been fully studied. This study employed spatial‐channel attention mechanisms to integrate frictional domain knowledge and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that predict the friction coefficient as the output. The models’ inputs include 3D texture data, corresponding finite element (FE) simulation outcomes, and 2D wavelet decomposition outcomes. An additional spatial attention (ASA) mechanism guided the CNNs to focus on the tire–road contact region, using tire–road contact stress from FE simulation as domain knowledge. Multi‐scale channel attention (MSCA) mechanisms enabled the CNNs to learn the channel weights of 2D‐wavelet‐based multi‐scale inputs, thereby assessing the contribution of different texture scales to tire–road friction. A multi‐attention and feature fusion mechanism was designed, and the performances of various combinations were compared. The results showed that the fusion of ASA and MSCA achieved the best performance, with a regression R2 of 0.8470, which was a 20.25% improvement over the baseline model.