A Rapid Pattern-Recognition Method for Driving Types Using Clustering-Based Support Vector Machines

To design an intelligent and human-centered control system [1] that adaptively adjusts relevant parameters in time to meet the human driver's needs and to provide a basic control law for the advanced vehicle dynamics control system [2][3] or driver assistance system [4][5], driver behaviors, driving styles or characteristics should be recognized and predicted. For example, to improve vehicle's fuel economy and reduce the emission, we can design different control strategies for driving styles. To achieve these goals, recognition and prediction of driving styles and characteristics precisely is the primary work. Drivers and their factors have been discussed from the viewpoint of application in vehicle dynamics [6][7], physical attributes of human drivers, and modeling driver [8][9]. For the recognition and prediction of driving characteristics or driver types, including physical characteristics/states (e.g., fatigue, drunk, and drowsiness), psychical characteristics (e.g., nervous, relaxed) and driving styles (e.g., aggressive, moderate), a lot of investigations have been conducted in recent years. In general, the basic idea to identify and predict driving behaviors or styles is based on driver model, called indirect or model-based method. The model-based method, firstly, requires to establish a driver model that can describe driver's