(Excerpt)
With vehicles becoming more connected and automated, a driver
monitoring system (DMS) has become a must-have technology to
monitor a driver's attention and prevent distracted driving. While
greater connectivity features such as navigation and hands-free
calling have enhanced drivers' in-vehicle experience, they have
also become a key source of distraction while driving, leading to
accidents and causing injuries and deaths. In the United States
alone, distracted driving claimed 3,166 lives in 2017, according to
a report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA) released last month.
DMS can be an effective technology to curb driver distraction
and thereby accidents; it continuously monitors a driver's status
and alerts the driver of any danger. While DMS itself is not new
and has been around for around two decades, the technology failed
to go mainstream until it started using in-vehicle cameras to
monitor drivers. Earlier versions of DMS used steering wheel
sensors and some relied on time-of-flight technology to gauge a
driver's head position. DMS has recently made considerable
progress, thanks to growing use of advanced image sensors, camera
systems and software that allow the system to track a driver's eyes
even when they are wearing sunglasses or at night.
Advanced DMS solutions
Israel-based Eyesight Technologies uses embedded computer vision
and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to provide advanced
driver monitoring capabilities. The company's driver monitoring
solution 'Driver Sense' tracks the driver's head pose, blink rate,
gaze vector and other visual attributes to detect distraction or
sign of drowsiness. Eyesight claims that when using DriverSense, a
vehicle's safety systems can be informed of driver distraction in
real time, allow the vehicle to trigger alerts and other actions at
the right time to prevent accidents.
Affectiva, a MIT Lab spin-off, uses cameras and microphones to
measure complex emotional and cognitive states from face and voice.
The company uses AI and deep learning technologies to offer
advanced driver monitoring by analyzing both face and voice for
level of driver impairment caused by physical distraction and
mental distraction from cognitive load or anger, drowsiness and
more.
Apart from the main function of monitoring driver attention and
detecting distraction, advanced DMS also enables personalization of
in-car environment. Eyesight's DriverSense, for example, allows
drivers to personalize in-vehicle settings by adjusting seat,
mirror, temperature and other cabin features according to their
preferences. When an enrolled driver enters the car, the solution
allows the driver to launch a pre-set profile.
Companies offering DMS are also launching solutions that enable
monitoring of not just the driver but the entire cabin, including
all occupants and objects. Eyesight has developed "Cabin Sense",
which monitors the entire in-cabin environment in real time. The
technology provides key cabin related information, such as the
number of passengers in the cabin, passenger recognition, posture
analysis and object detection. Cabin Sense enables real-time
adjustment of airbag deployment based on customer size and
position, triggers seatbelt alerts when worn improperly and adjusts
in-car environment according to the number of passengers present in
the vehicle.
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