Driver's cognitive distraction detection using physiological features by the adaboost

Effects of driver's states adaptive driving support systems is highly expected for the prevention of traffic accidents. In order to create this constituent technology, detecting driver's psychosomatic states which occurs just before a traffic accident is essential. Therefore driver's distraction is thought as one of important factors. This study focused on detecting driver's cognitive distraction, a state which can easily lead to a traffic accident. We reproduced the cognitive distraction by imposing conversation or arithmetic loads to the subjects on a driving simulator. A stereo camera system were used as the means to track a subject's eyes, and head movements, which were set as classification features for pattern recognition on the support vector machine (hereafter, SVM) basis used in the previous study of the AIDE project, a part of EU 6th framework programme. Diameter of pupil as well as the interval between heart R-waves (hereafter, heart rate RRI) from an ECG (electrocardiogram) were added for classification features to further improve the accuracy of driver's cognitive distraction detection. Based on this study, we established the methodology for more precise and faster driver's cognitive detection by using the AdaBoost.