Driver assistance for “Keeping Hands on the Wheel and Eyes on the Road”

Motivated from a basic tip for safe driving, "Keeping Hands on the Wheel and Eyes on the Road", this paper introduces a vision based system for driver activity analysis by observing 3D movement of driver\´s head and hands from multiview video. From the results of upper body and head pose tracking, semantic descriptions of driver activities are extracted in two steps: First, we determine basic activities of each upper body part (e.g. Two, one, or no hand is on the steering wheel; Head is looking left, straight, or right). Then these basic activities are combined in a fusion step to extract higher level of semantic description of driver activities (e.g. whether the driver is following the above safety tip or not). Our experimental evaluation with real-world street driving shows the promise of applying the proposed system for both post analysis of captured driving data as well as for real-time driver assistance.