Lightweight Driver Monitoring System Based on Multi-Task Mobilenets

Research on driver status recognition has been actively conducted to reduce fatal crashes caused by the driver’s distraction and drowsiness. As in many other research areas, deep-learning-based algorithms are showing excellent performance for driver status recognition. However, despite decades of research in the driver status recognition area, the visual image-based driver monitoring system has not been widely used in the automobile industry. This is because the system requires high-performance processors, as well as has a hierarchical structure in which each procedure is affected by an inaccuracy from the previous procedure. To avoid using a hierarchical structure, we propose a method using Mobilenets without the functions of face detection and tracking and show this method is enabled to recognize facial behaviors that indicate the driver’s distraction. However, frames per second processed by Mobilenets with a Raspberry pi, one of the single-board computers, is not enough to recognize the driver status. To alleviate this problem, we propose a lightweight driver monitoring system using a resource sharing device in a vehicle (e.g., a driver’s mobile phone). The proposed system is based on Multi-Task Mobilenets (MT-Mobilenets), which consists of the Mobilenets’ base and multi-task classifier. The three Softmax regressions of the multi-task classifier help one Mobilenets base recognize facial behaviors related to the driver status, such as distraction, fatigue, and drowsiness. The proposed system based on MT-Mobilenets improved the accuracy of the driver status recognition with Raspberry Pi by using one additional device.