Personal driving diary: Constructing a video archive of everyday driving events

In this paper, we introduce the concept of personal driving diary. A personal driving diary is a multimedia archive of a person's daily driving experience, describing important driving events of the user with annotated videos. This paper presents an automated system that constructs such multimedia diary by analyzing videos obtained from a vehicle-mounted camera. The proposed system recognizes important interactions between the driving vehicle and the others from videos (e.g. accident, overtaking, ...), and labels them together with its contextual knowledge on the vehicle (e.g. its physical location on the map) to construct an event log. A novel decision tree based activity recognizer that incrementally learns driving events from first-person view videos is designed. The constructed diary enables efficient searching and event-based browsing of video clips, which helps the user to retrieve videos of dangerous situations and analyze his/her driving habits statistically. Our experiment confirms that the proposed system reliably generates driving diaries by annotating learned vehicle events.