DETECTION OF DRIVER’S VISUAL DISTRACTION USING DUAL CAMERAS

Most serious accidents are caused by the driver’s visual distraction. Therefore, early detection of a driver’s visual distraction is very important. The detection system mostly used is the dashboard camera because it is cheap and convenient. However, some studies have focused on various methods using additional equipment such as vehicle-mounted devices, wearable devices, and specific cameras that are common. However, these proposals are expensive. Therefore, the main goal of our research is to create a low-cost, non-intrusive, and lightweight driver’s visual distraction detection (DVDD) system using only a simple dual dashboard camera. Currently, most research has focused only on tracking and estimating the driver’s gaze. In our study, additionally, we also aim to monitor the road environment and then evaluate the driver’s visual distraction detection based on the two pieces of information. The proposed system has two main modules: 1) gaze mapping and 2) moving object detection. The gaze mapping module receives video captured through a camera placed in front of the driver, and then predicts a driver’s gaze direction to one of predefined 16 gaze regions. Concurrently, the moving object detection module identifies the moving objects from the front view and determines in which part of the predefined 16 gaze regions it appears. By combining and evaluating the two modules, the state of the distraction of the driver can be estimated. If the two module outputs are different gaze regions or non-neighbor gaze regions, the system considers that the driver is visually distracted and issues a warning. We conducted experiments based on our self-built real-driving DriverGazeMapping dataset. In the gaze mapping module, we compared the two methods MobileNet and OpenFace with the SVM classifier. The two methods outperformed the baseline gaze mapping module. Moreover, in the OpenFace with SVM classifier method, we investigated which features extracted by OpenFace affected the performance of the gaze mapping module. Of these, the most effective feature was the combination of a gaze angle and head position_R features. The OpenFace with SVM method using gaze angle and head position_R features achieved a 6.25% higher accuracy than the method using MobileNet. Besides, the moving object detection module using the Lukas-Kanade dense method was faster and more reliable than in the previous study in our experiments.