Multi-Class Gaze Detection in a Dynamic Environment

Developing AI tools to identify areas of interest within a dynamic field of view is essential for objective behavioural evaluation of drivers. Video image classification and specifically image segmentation is a key technology to allow for the possibility of physiological and behavioural measurement of drivers. For example, to understand driver attention, one must measure where a driver is looking when driving and this requires segmentation of their field of view into relevant areas of interest, such as windows, mirrors, and dashboard. The present work addresses the challenge of dynamic field of view classification and shows the impact of transfer learning, a new AI tool, on segmentation accuracy. Results from this study demonstrate that transfer learning improves predictive performance by 0.02 to 0.20 Dice when large training sets were used. The resulting performance was >0.80 Dice for all classification tests of driver attention segmentation. This work showed that transfer learning also supported the use of smaller training sets while still providing adequate performance. This finding is key for applications where labeled training data is limited or costly to create. The present results expand the application space for deep learning-based image segmentation models.