Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Attention Network with Adaptive Risk-Aware Decision for Forward Collision Warning in Complex Scenarios

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel hierarchical spatio-temporal attention network with adaptive risk thresholds for forward collision warning, achieving high accuracy, efficiency, and reliability in complex driving scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated FCW framework combining a decoupled attention network with a dynamic risk threshold adjustment for improved performance and real-time decision-making.

Findings

Inference time reduced by 73% compared to Transformer methods.

Achieved 42.2% better ADE than Social_LSTM.

F1 score of 0.912 with 8.2% false alarms.

Abstract

Forward Collision Warning systems are crucial for vehicle safety and autonomous driving, yet current methods often fail to balance precise multi-agent interaction modeling with real-time decision adaptability, evidenced by the high computational cost for edge deployment and the unreliability stemming from simplified interaction models.To overcome these dual challenges-computational complexity and modeling insufficiency-along with the high false alarm rates of traditional static-threshold warnings, this paper introduces an integrated FCW framework that pairs a Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Attention Network with a Dynamic Risk Threshold Adjustment algorithm. HSTAN employs a decoupled architecture (Graph Attention Network for spatial, cascaded GRU with self-attention for temporal) to achieve superior performance and efficiency, requiring only 12.3 ms inference time (73% faster than Transformer methods) and reducing the Average Displacement Error (ADE) to 0.73m (42.2% better than Social_LSTM) on the NGSIM dataset. Furthermore, Conformalized Quantile Regression enhances reliability by generating prediction intervals (91.3% coverage at 90% confidence), which the DTRA module then converts into timely warnings via a physics-informed risk potential function and an adaptive threshold mechanism inspired by statistical process control.Tested across multi-scenario datasets, the complete system demonstrates high efficacy, achieving an F1 score of 0.912, a low false alarm rate of 8.2%, and an ample warning lead time of 2.8 seconds, validating the framework's superior performance and practical deployment feasibility in complex environments.