  Lane change (LC) is one of the safety-critical manoeuvres in highway driving
according to various road accident records. Thus, reliably predicting such
manoeuvre in advance is critical for the safe and comfortable operation of
automated driving systems. The majority of previous studies rely on detecting a
manoeuvre that has been already started, rather than predicting the manoeuvre
in advance. Furthermore, most of the previous works do not estimate the key
timings of the manoeuvre (e.g., crossing time), which can actually yield more
useful information for the decision making in the ego vehicle. To address these
shortcomings, this paper proposes a novel multi-task model to simultaneously
estimate the likelihood of LC manoeuvres and the time-to-lane-change (TTLC). In
both tasks, an attention-based convolutional neural network (CNN) is used as a
shared feature extractor from a bird's eye view representation of the driving
environment. The spatial attention used in the CNN model improves the feature
extraction process by focusing on the most relevant areas of the surrounding
environment. In addition, two novel curriculum learning schemes are employed to
train the proposed approach. The extensive evaluation and comparative analysis
of the proposed method in existing benchmark datasets show that the proposed
method outperforms state-of-the-art LC prediction models, particularly
considering long-term prediction performance.
