Who Make Drivers Stop? Towards Driver-centric Risk Assessment: Risk Object Identification via Causal Inference
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We propose a framework based on causal inference for risk object identification, an essential task towards driver-centric risk assessment. In this work, risk objects are defined as objects influencing driver's goal-oriented behavior. There are two limitations of the existing approaches. First, they require strong supervisions such as risk object location or human gaze location. Second, there is no explicit reasoning stage for identifying risk object. To address these issues, the task of identifying causes of driver behavioral change is formalized in the language of functional causal models and interventions. Specifically, we iteratively simulate causal effect by removing an object using the proposed driving model. The risk object is determined as the one causing the most substantial causal effect. We evaluate the proposed framework on the Honda Research Institute Driving Dataset (HDD). The dataset provides the annotation for risk object localization to enable systematic benchmarking with existing approaches. Our framework demonstrates a substantial average performance boost over a strong baseline by 7.5
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