Driver distraction detection via multi‐scale domain adaptation network

• Published in: IET intelligent transport systems 2023-09, Vol.17 (9), p.1742-1751
• Main Authors: Wang, Jing, Wu, ZhongCheng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: advanced driver assistance systems; intelligent transportation systems; learning (artificial intelligence)
• ISSN: 1751-956X; 1751-9578
• DOI: 10.1049/itr2.12366

Distracted driving is the leading cause of road traffic accidents. It is essential to monitor the driver's status to avoid traffic accidents caused by distracted driving. Current research on detecting distracting behaviours focuses on analysing image features using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, the generalisation ability of the current distracted driving models is limited. This paper aims to improve the generalisation ability of distracted driving models that are affected by factors such as the driver himself, the background, the monitoring angle, and so on. A new driver distraction detection method, which is referred to as multi‐scale domain adaptation network (MSDAN), was proposed to improve model adaptability. The method consists of three stages: first, multi‐scale convolution was introduced to build a new backbone to accommodate better the valuable feature of the target on different scales. Secondly, the authors designed the domain adaptation network to improve the model's adaptability to the difference in data sources through adversarial training. Finally, dropout is added to the fully connected layer to increase the model's generalisation ability. The comparison results on the large‐scale driver distraction detection dataset show that the authors’ method can accurately detect driver distraction and has good generalisation performance, with an accuracy improvement in the cross‐driver and cross‐dataset experiments.