Recognizing Distractions for Assistive Driving by Tracking Body Parts

Abstract

Busy life as well as the prevalence of infotainment is increasingly making people more occupied even during tasks that require serious attention. One such task is driving and at the same time getting involved in activities that may distract drivers cognitively from watching the road and cause fatal accidents. This paper presents a method that is capable of monitoring different types of distractions, such as talking and texting on cell phone, casual eating, and operating cabin equipment while driving, so that a driver can be assisted to remain cautious on the road. The proposed method automatically detects and tracks fiducial body parts of a driver from video captured by a camera mounted on the front windshield inside a vehicle. Relative distances between the tracking trajectories are used as features that represent actions of the driver. Then, the well-known kernel support vector machine is applied for recognizing a particular distraction from the features extracted from body parts. The proposed feature is also compared with previously employed features for tracking-based human action recognition schemes to substantiate its better result in terms of mean accuracy and robustness for distraction recognition. The effectiveness of the proposed method of distraction recognition is also analyzed with respect to tracking errors.