SideEye: Mobile assistant for blind spot monitoring

Distracted driving is an ever growing concern and driver safety systems are increasingly getting adopted. However, they still remain as features in the luxury vehicles. The high penetration of smartphones has made it possible to bring some of those safety features within everyone's reach. While some of the recent works have proposed tracking the road conditions as well as monitoring the driver with a smartphone, they have not covered the blind spot. In this paper, we present SideEye, a smartphone based system to monitor the blind spot on the driver side and alert the driver about the presence of a vehicle. We explore two approaches based on intensity variation and contour matching to detect a vehicle in the blind spot. Our evaluation shows that, when a vehicle is in the blind spot, our system can detect and alert the driver with an accuracy of 87% in real-time.