Driver activity analysis for intelligent vehicles: issues and development framework

This paper examines the feasibility of a semantic-level driver activity analysis system. Several new considerations are made to construct the hierarchy of driver activity. Driver activity is represented and recognized at multiple levels: individual body-part pose/gesture at the low level, single body-part action at the middle level, and the driver interaction with the vehicle at the high level. Driving is represented in terms of the interactions among driver, vehicle, and surround, and driver activity is recognized by a rule-based decision tree. Our system works with a single color camera data, and it can be easily expanded to incorporate multimodal sensor data.