Is My Driver Observation Model Overconfident? Input-Guided Calibration Networks for Reliable and Interpretable Confidence Estimates

Driver observation models are rarely deployed under perfect conditions. In practice, illumination, camera placement and type differ from the ones present during training and unforeseen behaviours may occur at any time. While observing the human behind the steering wheel leads to more intuitive human-vehicle-interaction and safer driving, it requires recognition algorithms which do not only predict the correct driver state, but also determine their prediction quality through realistic and interpretable confidence measures. Reliable uncertainty estimates are crucial for building trust and are a serious obstacle for deploying activity recognition networks in real driving systems. In this work, we for the first time examine how well the confidence values of modern driver observation models indeed match the probability of the correct outcome and show that raw neural network-based approaches tend to significantly overestimate their prediction quality. To correct this misalignment between the confidence values and the actual uncertainty, we consider two strategies. First, we enhance two activity recognition models often used for driver observation with temperature scaling – an off-the-shelf method for confidence calibration in image classification. Then, we introduce Calibrated Action Recognition with Input Guidance (CARING) – a novel approach leveraging an additional neural network to learn scaling the confidences depending on the video representation. Extensive experiments on the Drive&Act dataset demonstrate that both strategies drastically improve the quality of model confidences, while our CARING model outperforms both, the original architectures and their temperature scaling enhancement, leading to best uncertainty estimates.