Behavior-Aware Knowledge-Embedded Model for Driver Attention Prediction

Accurately predicting driver attention is crucial for enhancing advanced driving assistance systems and autonomous vehicles, attracting increasing research interest. Most existing approaches, rooted in general, task-free saliency detection, adopt data-driven paradigms to correlate bottom-up environmental situations with attention distributions. However, they often overlook the complex top-down task-driven aspects of driver attention that are fundamental for the safe navigation of driving tasks, leading to limitations in handling real-world scenarios. In this paper, we take an initial step to explore and introduce BKnet, a Behavior-aware Knowledge-embedded model that innovatively integrates driving behaviors and empirical knowledge. Specifically, inspired by the human long-term cognitive process, we introduce a novel knowledge memory mechanism. It dynamically associates varied traffic scenarios with consistent driving behaviors, fostering the generation of robust behavior-aware empirical knowledge representations. To this end, BKnet facilitates a nuanced and comprehensive simulation of drivers’ attention mechanisms, driven synergistically by both top-down and bottom-up processes. Additionally, we further contribute to the field by collecting a novel Behavior-Aware Driver Attention (BADA) dataset. To the best of our knowledge, BADA is the first attention dataset explicitly incorporated into real-world driving behavior tasks from multiple drivers. Lastly, comprehensive experiments underscore BKnet’s superiority over existing state-of-the-art approaches and validate the effectiveness and necessity of integrating behavior-aware knowledge into driver attention prediction.