FBLNet: FeedBack Loop Network for Driver Attention Prediction

Yilong Chen, Zhixiong Nan, Tao Xiang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 13371-13380

The problem of predicting driver attention from the driving perspective is gaining increasing research focus due to its remarkable significance for autonomous driving and assisted driving systems. The driving experience is extremely important for safe driving, a skilled driver is able to effortlessly predict oncoming danger (before it becomes salient) based on the driving experience and quickly pay attention to the corresponding zones. However, the nonobjective driving experience is difficult to model, so a mechanism simulating the driver experience accumulation procedure is absent in existing methods, and the current methods usually follow the technique line of saliency prediction methods to predict driver attention. In this paper, we propose a FeedBack Loop Network (FBLNet), which attempts to model the driving experience accumulation procedure. By over-and-over iterations, FBLNet generates the incremental knowledge that carries rich historically-accumulative and long-term temporal information. The incremental knowledge in our model is like the driving experience of humans. Under the guidance of the incremental knowledge, our model fuses the CNN feature and Transformer feature that are extracted from the input image to predict driver attention. Our model exhibits a solid advantage over existing methods, achieving an outstanding performance improvement on two driver attention benchmark datasets.