A Survey on Driver Behavior Analysis From In-Vehicle Cameras

Distracted or drowsy driving is unsafe driving behavior responsible for thousands of crashes every year. Studying driver behavior has challenges associated with observing drivers in their natural environment. The naturalistic driving study (NDS) has become the most sought-after approach, since it eliminates the bias of a controlled setup, allowing researchers to understand drivers’ behavior in real-world scenarios. Video recordings collected in NDS research are incredibly insightful in identifying driver errors. Computer vision techniques have been used to autonomously analyze video data and classify drivers’ behavior. While computer vision scientists focus on image analytics, NDS researchers are interested in the factors impacting driver behavior. This survey paper makes a concerted effort to serve both communities by comprehensively reviewing studies, describing their data collection, computer vision techniques implemented, and performance in classifying driver behavior. The scope is limited to studies employing at least one camera observing the driver inside a vehicle. Based on their objective, papers have been classified as detecting low-level (e.g. head orientation) or high-level (e.g. distraction detection) driver information. Papers have been further classified based on the datasets they employ. In addition to twelve public datasets, many private datasets have also been identified, and their data collection design is discussed to highlight any impact on model performance. Across each task, algorithms employed and their performance are discussed to establish a baseline. A comparison of different frameworks for NDS video data analytics throws light on the existing gaps in the state-of-the-art that can be addressed by future computer vision research.