4 research outputs found
Driver Distraction Identification with an Ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks
The World Health Organization (WHO) reported 1.25 million deaths yearly due
to road traffic accidents worldwide and the number has been continuously
increasing over the last few years. Nearly fifth of these accidents are caused
by distracted drivers. Existing work of distracted driver detection is
concerned with a small set of distractions (mostly, cell phone usage).
Unreliable ad-hoc methods are often used.In this paper, we present the first
publicly available dataset for driver distraction identification with more
distraction postures than existing alternatives. In addition, we propose a
reliable deep learning-based solution that achieves a 90% accuracy. The system
consists of a genetically-weighted ensemble of convolutional neural networks,
we show that a weighted ensemble of classifiers using a genetic algorithm
yields in a better classification confidence. We also study the effect of
different visual elements in distraction detection by means of face and hand
localizations, and skin segmentation. Finally, we present a thinned version of
our ensemble that could achieve 84.64% classification accuracy and operate in a
real-time environment.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1706.0949
Why so serious? – Comparing two traffic conflict techniques for assessing encounters in shared space
In Germany, approximately 2.7 million crashes occurred
in 2019. Especially vulnerable road users (VRU) have a high risk of
being seriously injured or killed in traffic. Within the safe system approach, changes to the traffic infrastructure have been implemented
to increase VRU safety. The creation of so-called shared spaces, in
which all road users are encouraged to negotiate priority, is part of
these efforts. Even though the concept has been known and applied for
more than 40 years, comparatively little is known about interactions
between different road users and methods to quantify interactions in
shared spaces. The aim of this study is to investigate similarities and
differences in quantifying the level of severity of encounters between
pedestrians and motorised vehicles applying the Swedish traffic conflicts technique (STCT) and the pedestrian-vehicle conflicts analysis
(PVCA). The STCT integrates the factors conflicting speed (CS) and
time-to-accident (TA) to arrive at a severity level. In contrast, with
four factors, the PVCA integrates more elements: time-to-collision
(TTC, corresponding to TA), severity of evasive action, complexity of evasive action, and distance-to-collision (DTC). Trajectory and video
data of a shared space were recorded using the Application Platform
for Intelligent Mobile Units (AIM) in Ulm, Germany. 1364 interactions
were randomly selected. Due to different exclusion criteria, such as
interaction partners not being a car or pedestrian, missing values, and
detection errors, 69 encounters were available for analyses. Using the
PVCA, nine encounters were classified as critical and 60 as non-critical
interactions. In contrast, computing the values based on the STCT, only
three of the 69 encounters were categorised as critical. The results of
a Spearman rank correlation did not show a significant correlation
between the severity categories of the PVCA and severity levels of
the STCT (r = 0.03, p = 0.78). An additional analysis of the encounters
ranked as critical by the PVCA but as non-critical by the STCT showed
that all six encounters had a large temporal distance (> 2 s) combined
with very small spatial distance (< 5 m for vehicles and < 2.5 m for
pedestrians). While the PVCA and STCT yielded similar results in most
encounters, this could not be confirmed for all. Results indicate that
spatial distance may contribute to the severity of encounters between
pedestrians and vehicles in a shared space
Deep Learning-based Driver Behavior Modeling and Analysis
Driving safety continues receiving widespread attention from car designers, safety regulators, and automotive research community as driving accidents due to driver distraction or fatigue have increased drastically over the years. In the past decades, there has been a remarkable push towards designing and developing new driver assistance systems with much better recognition and prediction capabilities. Equipped with various sensory systems, these Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are able to accurately perceive information on road conditions, predict traffic situations, estimate driving risks, and provide drivers with imminent warnings and visual assistance. In this thesis, we focus on two main aspects of driver behavior modeling in the design of new generation of ADAS.
We first aim at improving the generalization ability of driver distraction recognition systems to diverse driving scenarios using the latest tools of machine learning and connectionist modeling, namely deep learning. To this end, we collect a large dataset of images on various driving situations of drivers from the Internet. Then we introduce Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) as a data augmentation tool to enhance detection accuracy. A novel driver monitoring system is also introduced. This monitoring system combines multi-information resources, including a driver distraction recognition system, to assess the danger levels of driving situations. Moreover, this thesis proposes a multi-modal system for distraction recognition under various lighting conditions and presents a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture, which can operate real-time on a resources-limited computational platform. The new CNN is built upon a novel network bottleneck of Depthwise Separable Convolution layers.
The second part of this thesis focuses on driver maneuver prediction, which infers the direction a driver will turn to before a green traffic light is on and predicts accurately whether or not he/she will change the current driving lane. Here, a new method to label driving maneuver records is proposed, by which driving feature sequences for the training of prediction systems are more closely related to their labels. To this end, a new prediction system, which is based on Quasi-Recurrent Neural Networks, is introduced. In addition, and as an application of maneuver prediction, a novel driving proficiency assessment method is proposed. This method exploits the generalization abilities of different maneuver prediction systems to estimate drivers' driving abilities, and it demonstrates several advantages against existing assessment methods.
In conjunction with the theoretical contribution, a series of comprehensive experiments are conducted, and the proposed methods are assessed against state-of-the-art works. The analysis of experimental results shows the improvement of results as compared with existing techniques