Non-Contact Based Modeling of Enervation

Significant research is currently carried out with a focus on autonomous vehicles; research is starting to focus on areas such as the modeling of occupant states and behavioral elements. This paper contributes to this line of research by developing a pipeline that extracts physiological signals from thermal imagery and modeling occupant enervation using a fully non-contact based approach. These signals are obtained via a multimodal dataset of 36 subjects across multiple channels, including the thermal and physiological modalities. Moreover, we provide a comparative analysis of non-contact and contact based channels to model the enervation state of individuals. Our analysis indicates that non-contact physiological signals extracted from thermal imagery can reach and exceed the performance of contact-based physiological signals. In addition, modeling of enervation is possible using said non-contact physiological signals and thermal features, with an accuracy of up to 70% in identifying energized and enervated occupant states. Our findings provide a novel approach for future research and opens the possibility for integration of unrestrictive sensors in future automobiles.