Driver Behaviour State Recognition based on Speech

Abstract

Researches have linked the cause of traffic accident to driver behavior and some studies provided practical preventive measures based on different input sources. Due to its simplicity to collect, speech can be used as one of the input. The emotion information gathered from speech can be used to measure driver behavior state based on the hypothesis that emotion influences driver behavior. However, the massive amount of driving speech data may hinder optimal performance of processing and analyzing the data due to the computational complexity and time constraint. This paper presents a silence removal approach using Short Term Energy (STE) and Zero Crossing Rate (ZCR) in the pre-processing phase to reduce the unnecessary processing. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) feature extraction method coupled with Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier are employed to get the driver behavior state recognition performance. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach can obtain comparable performance with accuracy ranging between 58.7% and 76.6% to differentiate four driver behavior states, namely; talking through mobile phone, laughing, sleepy and normal driving. It is envisaged that such approach can be extended for a more comprehensive driver behavior identification system that may acts as an embedded warning system for sleepy driver.