Owl and Lizard: Patterns of Head Pose and Eye Pose in Driver Gaze Classification

Accurate, robust, inexpensive gaze tracking in the car can help keep a driver safe by facilitating the more effective study of how to improve (1) vehicle interfaces and (2) the design of future Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. In this paper, we estimate head pose and eye pose from monocular video using methods developed extensively in prior work and ask two new interesting questions. First, how much better can we classify driver gaze using head and eye pose versus just using head pose? Second, are there individual-specific gaze strategies that strongly correlate with how much gaze classification improves with the addition of eye pose information? We answer these questions by evaluating data drawn from an on-road study of 40 drivers. The main insight of the paper is conveyed through the analogy of an "owl" and "lizard" which describes the degree to which the eyes and the head move when shifting gaze. When the head moves a lot ("owl"), not much classification improvement is attained by estimating eye pose on top of head pose. On the other hand, when the head stays still and only the eyes move ("lizard"), classification accuracy increases significantly from adding in eye pose. We characterize how that accuracy varies between people, gaze strategies, and gaze regions.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IET Computer Vision. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1507.0476

Is the Pedestrian going to Cross? Answering by 2D Pose Estimation

Our recent work suggests that, thanks to nowadays powerful CNNs, image-based 2D pose estimation is a promising cue for determining pedestrian intentions such as crossing the road in the path of the ego-vehicle, stopping before entering the road, and starting to walk or bending towards the road. This statement is based on the results obtained on non-naturalistic sequences (Daimler dataset), i.e. in sequences choreographed specifically for performing the study. Fortunately, a new publicly available dataset (JAAD) has appeared recently to allow developing methods for detecting pedestrian intentions in naturalistic driving conditions; more specifically, for addressing the relevant question is the pedestrian going to cross? Accordingly, in this paper we use JAAD to assess the usefulness of 2D pose estimation for answering such a question. We combine CNN-based pedestrian detection, tracking and pose estimation to predict the crossing action from monocular images. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-of-the-art results.Comment: This is a paper presented in IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IEEE IV 2018