One Perception, All Maneuvers: Directional Traffic Signal Understanding for Maneuver-Level Signal Intent Prediction
This study addresses the limitation of existing autonomous driving traffic signal perception, which merely recognizes colors without semantically interpreting right-of-way for specific driving maneuvers. To bridge this gap, this work proposes a directional traffic signal understanding task that predicts structured signal states and passing permissions—such as going straight or turning—directly from images. Accordingly, a direction-level benchmark is constructed based on OpenLane-V2, alongside a direction-aware baseline model designed to integrate global context, local evidence, and action-specific representations. By closing the semantic gap between perception and planning, the proposed approach provides an interpretable signal interface. Experimental results demonstrate that it significantly improves passing permission prediction accuracy in complex intersection scenarios compared to conventional detection pipelines, thereby effectively supporting downstream path planning.