Video-Based Classification of Driving Behavior Using a Hierarchical Classification System with Multiple Features

Driver fatigue and inattention have long been recognized as one of the main contributing factors in traffic accidents. Therefore, the development of intelligent driver assistance systems, which provides automatic monitoring of driver's vigilance, is an urgent and challenging task. This paper presents a novel system for video-based driving behavior recognition. The fundamental idea is to monitor driver's hand movements and to use these as predictors for safe/unsafe driving behavior. In comparison to previous work, the proposed method utilizes hierarchical classification and treats driving behavior in terms of a spatio-temporal reference framework as opposed to a static image. The approach was verified using the Southeast University Driving-Posture Dataset, a dataset comprised of video clips covering aspects of driving such as: normal driving, responding to a cell phone call, eating and smoking. After pre-processing for illumination variations and motion sequence segmentation, eight classes of behavior were identified. The overall prediction accuracy obtained using the proposed approach was 89.62% when using a hierarchical classification approach. The proposed approach was able to clearly identify two dangerous driving behaviors, Responding to a cellphone call and Eating, with recognition rates of 92.39% and 92.29% respectively.