DriverSonar: Fine-Grained Dangerous Driving Detection Using Active Sonar

Dangerous driving due to drowsiness and distraction is the main cause of traffic accidents, resulting in casualties and economic loss. There is an urgent need to address this problem by accurately detecting dangerous driving behaviors and generating real-time alerts. Inspired by the observation that dangerous driving actions induce unique acoustic features that respond to the signal of an acoustic source, we present the DriverSonar system in this paper. The proposed system detects dangerous driving actions and generates real-time alarms using off-the-shelf smartphones. Compared with the state-of-the-arts, the DriverSonar system does not require dedicated sensors but just uses the built-in speaker and microphone in a smartphone. Specifically, DriverSonar is able to recognize head/hand motions such as nodding, yawning, and abrupt adjustment of the steering wheel. We design, implement and evaluate DriverSonar with extensive experiments. We conduct both simulator-based and and real driving-based experiments (IRB-approved) with 30 volunteers for a period over 12 months. Experiment results show that the proposed system can detect drowsy and distraction related dangerous driving actions at an precision up to 93.2% and a low false acceptance rate of 3.6%.