Spatial-Temporal Perception with Causal Inference for Naturalistic Driving Action Recognition

Naturalistic driving action recognition is essential for vehicle cabin monitoring systems. However, the complexity of real-world backgrounds presents significant challenges for this task, and previous approaches have struggled with practical implementation due to their limited ability to observe subtle behavioral differences and effectively learn inter-frame features from video. In this paper, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Perception (STP) architecture that emphasizes both temporal information and spatial relationships between key objects, incorporating a causal decoder to perform behavior recognition and temporal action localization. Without requiring multimodal input, STP directly extracts temporal and spatial distance features from RGB video clips. Subsequently, these dual features are jointly encoded by maximizing the expected likelihood across all possible permutations of the factorization order. By integrating temporal and spatial features at different scales, STP can perceive subtle behavioral changes in challenging scenarios. Additionally, we introduce a causal-aware module to explore relationships between video frame features, significantly enhancing detection efficiency and performance. We validate the effectiveness of our approach using two publicly available driver distraction detection benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance.