Preliminary Investigation of Visual Information Influencing Driver’s Steering Control based on CNN

Understanding the relationship between driving behavior and visual information is an important issue in order to understand driving behavior holistically. In this study, we constructed a driver model that reproduces the driver’s steering behavior from visual information based on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with human physical characteristics. We obtained the driving behavior in a simulator study to train the proposed CNN model. Which region in the visual field influencing drivers’ steering behavior was analyzed using the results of the feature maps generated by the trained CNN model and the driver’s gaze behavior. The results indicate that the drivers perform steering action using the information within 20 degrees from the gaze point.