Behavior-Centric Extraction of Scenarios from Highway Traffic Data and their Domain-Knowledge-Guided Clustering using CVQ-VAE

TL;DR

This paper presents a standardized, behavior-centric method for extracting and clustering highway traffic scenarios from real-world data, integrating domain knowledge for improved interpretability and validation of automated driving systems.

Contribution

It introduces a scenario extraction approach based on the Scenario-as-Specification concept and a domain-knowledge-guided clustering process, enhancing scenario standardization and interpretability.

Findings

Scenarios can be reliably extracted from highD dataset.

Domain knowledge effectively guides scenario clustering.

Method improves scenario standardization for AV validation.

Abstract

Approval of ADS depends on evaluating its behavior within representative real-world traffic scenarios. A common way to obtain such scenarios is to extract them from real-world data recordings. These can then be grouped and serve as basis on which the ADS is subsequently tested. This poses two central challenges: how scenarios are extracted and how they are grouped. Existing extraction methods rely on heterogeneous definitions, hindering scenario comparability. For the grouping of scenarios, rule-based or ML-based methods can be utilized. However, while modern ML-based approaches can handle the complexity of traffic scenarios, unlike rule-based approaches, they lack interpretability and may not align with domain-knowledge. This work contributes to a standardized scenario extraction based on the Scenario-as-Specification concept, as well as a domain-knowledge-guided scenario clustering process. Experiments on the highD dataset demonstrate that scenarios can be extracted reliably and that domain-knowledge can be effectively integrated into the clustering process. As a result, the proposed methodology supports a more standardized process for deriving scenario categories from highway data recordings and thus enables a more efficient validation process of automated vehicles.