Learning Driver-Irrelevant Features for Generalizable Driver Behavior Recognition

Traffic accidents caused by driver distractions have seriously endangered public safety, with driver distractions typically stemming from behaviors beyond safe driving. Recently, vision-based driver behavior recognition has attracted much attention, achieving great success with deep learning-based schemes. However, the generalization ability of these models in real-world scenarios remains unsatisfactory. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth investigation into the underlying causes of this unsatisfactory generalization and conclude that the behavior features extracted by convolutional neural networks are intertwined with driver identity features. Based on this discovery, we propose a feature decomposition (FD) framework to disentangle these two types of features. The separated behavior features, referred to as driver-irrelevant behavior features, are subsequently leveraged for behavior recognition. Moreover, we introduce a co-training strategy to optimize the FD framework. This strategy enables behavior features and identity features to provide mutual auxiliary signals and encourages each other to drop the information that do not belong to them, so that the learned behavior features can be driver-irrelevant. Rigorous experiments are conducted on two widely-studied datasets, yielding results that demonstrate the superior performance of our framework and its improved generalization capabilities. Importantly, our framework’s fast inference capabilities make it highly suitable for real-world scenarios. Codes are released at
https://github.com/gaohangcodes/
LearningDriverIrrelevantFeatures4DBR.