Detection of Distracted Driver Using Convolutional Neural Network

Number of road accidents is continuously increasing in last few years worldwide. As per the survey of National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator, nearly one in five motor vehicle crashes are caused by distracted driver. We attempt to develop an accurate and robust system for detecting distracted driver and warn him against it. Motivated by the performance of Convolutional Neural Networks in computer vision, we present a CNN based system that not only detects the distracted driver but also identifies the cause of distraction. VGG-16 architecture is modified for this particular task and various regularization techniques are implied in order to improve the performance. Experimental results show that our system outperforms earlier methods in literature achieving an accuracy of 96.31% and processes 42 images per second on GPU. We also study the effect of dropout, L2 regularization and batch normalisation on the performance of the system. Next, we present a modified version of our architecture that achieves 95.54% classification accuracy with the number of parameters reduced from 140M in original VGG-16 to 15M only.