Design of a Human Evaluator Model for the Ride Comfort of Vehicle on a Speed Bump Using a Neural Artistic Style Extraction

Abstract

The subjective evaluation of vehicle ride comfort is costly and time-consuming but is crucial for vehicle development. To reduce the cost and time, the objectification of subjective evaluation has been widely studied, and most of the approaches use a regression model between objective metrics and subjective ratings. However, the accuracy of these approaches is highly dependent on the selection of the objective metrics. In most of the methods, it is not clear that the selected metrics are sufficiently significant or whether all significant metrics are included in the selection. This paper presents a method to build a correlation model between measurements and subjective evaluations without using predefined features or objective metrics. A numerical representation of ride comfort was extracted from raw signals based on the idea of the artistic style transfer method. The correlation model was designed based on the extracted numerical representation and subjective ratings. The model has a much better accuracy than any other correlation models in the literature. This better accuracy is contributed to not only by using a neural network, but also by the extraction of the numerical representation of ride comfort using a pre-trained neural network.