Distracted Driving Behavior and Driver’s Emotion Detection Based on Improved YOLOv8 With Attention Mechanism

An improved YOLOv8 detection method is proposed for detecting distracted driving behavior and driver’s emotion. Unlike the commonly used YOLOv8 method, an attention mechanism named MHSA and a CNN module are synthesized to ensure improved performance in terms of accuracy and convergence, where MHSA is used to detect distracted driving behavior and CNN is used to detect driver’s emotion. The FER2013 dataset and collected dataset are used to train the improved YOLOv8. The training results show that the proposed YOLOv8 demonstrates improved performance compared with the commonly used YOLO based methods. Finally, the validity of the proposed YOLOv8 method is illustrated through implementations in Jetson Nano platform, where the TensorRT and DeepStream methods in the Jetson Nano device are used to optimize the volume and operational speed of the proposed YOLOv8 method, respectively. Test results show that the proposed YOLOv8 method can yield better real-time and accuracy properties.