Driver-Monitoring-Camera Based Threat Awareness for Collision Avoidance

Abstract: Since forward collision is one of the most common and dangerous types of traffic accidents, many studies and researches have been conducted to develop forward collision avoidance system. To facilitate the tradeoff between comfort and safety for forward collision avoidance, the driver's state needs to be monitored and estimated. Such support is necessary for Forward Collision Warning (FCW) system given human-involved control. Due to the advances of Driver Monitoring System (DMS), the demand for camera-based driver's state estimation has increased. This master thesis project, conducted at Zenuity AB, investigates a method to estimate driver's awareness based on DMS. The estimation of a driver's awareness is expected to help adapt FCW system based on visual attention when facing the unpredictable braking of the leading vehicle. The project consists of three tasks: gaze estimation, Gaze-to-Object Mapping (GTOM), and awareness estimation. A combined Kalman Filter was developed in gaze estimation for compensation of missing data and outliers and reducing the difference to “ground truth” data. The uncertainty matrix from gaze estimation was utilized to extract a gaze-to-object probability signal in GTOM, while the corresponding fixation duration was also obtained in GTOM. The two extracted new features were used in awareness estimation with two methods: Logistic Regression and two-Hidden Markov Model. The comparison between the two methods reveals whether a complex method is preferred or not. Based on the results of this project, Logistic Regression seems to perform better in driver's state estimation, with 92.0% accuracy and 76.3% True Negative rate. However, further research and improvements on the two-Hidden Markov Model are needed to reach a more comprehensive conclusion. The main contribution of this project is an investigation of an end-to-end method for driver's awareness estimation and thereby an identification of challenges for further studies.