Driving posture recognition by convolutional neural networks

Driver fatigue and inattention have long been recognised as the main contributing factors in traffic accidents. This study presents a novel system which applies convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically learn and predict pre-defined driving postures. The main idea is to monitor driver hand position with discriminative information extracted to predict safe/unsafe driving posture. In comparison to previous approaches, CNNs can automatically learn discriminative features directly from raw images. In the authors' works, a CNN model was first pre-trained by an unsupervised feature learning method called sparse filtering, and subsequently fine-tuned with classification. The approach was verified using the Southeast University driving posture dataset, which comprised of video clips covering four driving postures, including normal driving, responding to a cell phone call, eating, and smoking. Compared with other popular approaches with different image descriptors and classification methods, the authors' scheme achieves the best performance with an overall accuracy of 99.78%. To evaluate the effectiveness and generalisation performance in more realistic conditions, the method was further tested using other two specially designed datasets which takes into account of the poor illuminations and different road conditions, achieving an overall accuracy of 99.3 and 95.77%, respectively.