Driver distraction detection with a camera vision system

Driver assistance systems and electronics (e.g. navigators, cell phones, etc.) steal increasing amounts of driver attention. Therefore, the vehicle industry is striving to build a driving environment where input-output devices are smartly scheduled, allowing sufficient time for the driver to focus attention on the surrounding traffic. To enable a smart human-machine interface (HMI), the driver's momentary state needs to be measured. This paper describes a facility for monitoring the distraction of a driver and presents some early evaluation results. The module is able to detect the driver's visual and cognitive workload by fusing stereo vision and lane tracking data, running both rule-based and support-vector machine (SVM) classification methods. The module has been tested with data from a truck and a passenger car. The results show over 80% success in detecting visual distraction and a 68-86% success in detecting cognitive distraction, which are satisfactory results.