Real-time Distracted Driver Posture Classification

Distracted driving is a worldwide problem leading to an astoundingly increasing number of accidents and deaths. Existing work is concerned with a very small set of distractions (mostly, cell phone usage). Also, for the most part, it uses unreliable ad-hoc methods to detect those distractions. In this paper, we present the first publicly available dataset for "distracted driver" posture estimation with more distraction postures than existing alternatives. In addition, we propose a reliable system that achieves a 95.98% driving posture classification accuracy. The system consists of a genetically-weighted ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We show that a weighted ensemble of classifiers using a genetic algorithm yields in better classification confidence. We also study the effect of different visual elements (i.e. hands and face) in distraction detection by means of face and hand localizations. Finally, we present a thinned version of our ensemble that could achieve a 94.29% classification accuracy and operate in a real-time environment.