Introduction: With the development of artificial intelligence and autonomous driving technology, the application of motion recognition in automotive autonomous driving is becoming more and more important. The traditional feature extraction method uses adaptive search hybrid learning and needs to design the feature extraction process manually, which is difficult to meet the recognition requirements in complex environments.Methods: In this paper, a fusion algorithm is proposed to classify the driving characteristics through time-frequency analysis, and perform backpropagation operation in artificial neural network to improve the convergence speed of the algorithm. The performance analysis experiments of the study were carried out on Autov data sets, and the results were compared with those of the other three algorithms.Results: When the vehicle action coefficient is 227, the judgment accuracy of the four algorithms is 0.98, 0.94, 0.93 and 0.95, respectively, indicating that the fusion algorithm is stable. When the road sample is 547, the vehicle driving ability of the fusion algorithm is 4.7, which is the best performance among the four algorithms, indicating that the fusion algorithm has strong adaptability.Discussion: The results show that the fusion algorithm has practical significance in improving the autonomous operation ability of autonomous vehicles, reducing the frequency of vehicle accidents during driving, and contributing to the development of production, life and society.