Car Camera System Knows When You Have Road Rage

[Raistlin]

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A team of researchers at EPFL have developed a prototype that uses in-car cameras to analyse drivers' facial expressions to detect emotion, in particular irritation.

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Hua Goa and Anil Yuce from the Signal Processing 5 Laboratory worked with Peugeot Citroen to develop the emotion detector. Early tests show that the system could be useful for making people safer drivers.

Road rage has been found to cause unsafe driving -- between 1990 and 1996 road rage contributed to 12,610 injuries and 218 deaths in the US alone. Finding ways to detect driver irritation with a view to intervene could help reduce this risk.

The prototype comprised of a near infrared camera positioned on the dashboard just above the steering wheel. This would point towards the driver's face. The driver's facial features and position are then tracked in real-time, and the expression is then compared to a database of expressions that the system has been taught to recognise, looking out for signs of anger and disgust. The software was trained to do this by first of all analysing photos and videos of people expressing these emotions, using footage taken from inside cars and also from other contexts, such as the office.

Eventually the system was able to detect irritation in the majority of cases. When it failed, it was usually because the way that person expressed irritation was very different from the norm -- people express anger in lots of different ways. The ability to detect irritation will be improved by updating the database of emotion in real time.

Beyond the variety of expressions that drivers can have when in the car, the biggest challenge for the system was making sure it was optimally positioned in front of the driver's face without interfering with his or her view. This was compounded by the fact that drivers tend to move their heads around, making expression recognition more difficult.

Prof. Jean-Philippe Thiran, who headed up the project, told Wired.co.uk that to address this the team "built a system that estimates the head pose, and corrects the images accordingly to generate a virtual frontal image". However, he says, "We are still working on improving this."

The proposed best system was able to successfully detect irritation in 90.5 percent of indoor cases and 85 percent of in-car cases -- this was because of the awkward angle and subsequent image adjustment required in-car so that the camera wasn't obscuring the driver's view.

The prototype was also trained to detect fatigue by monitoring the movement of the eyelids, and the team plans to add in the ability to detect distraction and a lip reading capability that could help with voice recognition.

The fatigue monitoring system echoes that developed by Seeing Machines for use in commercial lorries and mining trucks. It used a camera and infrared light sources to track eye and eyelid behaviour, looking for frequency of blinking, duration of blinks and the velocity of the eyelid for patterns associated with tiredness. Any signs of fatigue would trigger an alarm to wake the driver, and after three strikes the driver's boss would be alerted.

Thiran says that this project is still at an "advanced research stage", but that there is an "emerging consensus that driver monitoring will become highly recommended, if not mandatory, for vehicles with high levels of assistance" -- something that he refers to as "adaptive assistance". The vehicles which assist in this way will be introduced just before fully autonomous ones, he predicts, which will be just before 2020.

"In the meanwhile, some simpler evolutions will appear: detecting emotional states like stress or anger would allow starting countermeasures, for example quiet music or soft light on the dashboard. Similarly, detecting fatigue could lead to launching energetic music or more aggressive lighting of the dashboard," he adds

[crofter]

Detection is not a remedy, and can it ever be, to some people who seem to take it as a personal attack on their ego if anyone else on the road does not do exactly as they think they should,when they should

I wonder if a form of claustrophobia within the confines of the car has a bearing on this.

I remember a tv show to correct bad driving,that comments were made about the person featured was totally different away from the car

Everyone has a chunter,now and then,it gets it off the chest,but not the seeing red and losing self control extremes that occur

Just my two penn'th.

Anyone anything to add ??

Del