MEDIRL: Predicting the Visual Attention of Drivers via Maximum Entropy Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Sonia Baee, Erfan Pakdamanian, Inki Kim, Lu Feng, Vicente Ordonez, Laura Barnes; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 13178-13188

Inspired by human visual attention, we propose a novel inverse reinforcement learning formulation using Maximum Entropy Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning (MEDIRL) for predicting the visual attention of drivers in accident-prone situations. MEDIRL predicts fixation locations that lead to maximal rewards by learning a task-sensitive reward function from eye fixation patterns recorded from attentive drivers. Additionally, we introduce EyeCar, a new driver attention dataset in accident-prone situations. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate our proposed model on three common benchmarks: (DR(eye)VE, BDD-A, DADA-2000), and our EyeCar dataset. Results indicate that MEDIRL outperforms existing models for predicting attention and achieves state-of-the-art performance. We present extensive ablation studies to provide more insights into different features of our proposed model.