Enhancing Driver Distraction Recognition Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Distracted driving is among the primary causes for serious car accidents. Among the leading cause of death among teenagers today are traffic accidents and major part of them are related to distracted driving. We propose here an end-to-end Convolutional Neural Network-based driver distraction recognition (DDR) system that can generalize to diverse driving conditions. The proposed method consists of two steps: developing generative models to produce images of different driving scenarios and developing a discriminative model for image classification. Unlike traditional methods based on image data-sets collected by simulation experiments, we collect a diverse data-set of drivers in different driving conditions and activity patterns from the Internet and train generative models for multiple driving scenarios. By sampling from these generative models, we augment the collected data-set with new training samples and train a Convolutional Neural Network for distraction recognition. We demonstrate that the generative models are able to generate images of drivers in different driving scenarios. With augmentative images, the DDR system achieves an improvement of 11.45% on image classification performance in a driving simulation environment. Moreover, we demonstrate how the trained DDR systems can be integrated within a driver monitoring system.