Recognizing driving postures by combined features of contourlet transform and edge orientation histogram, and random subspace classifier ensembles

Abstract

In order to develop Human-centered Driver Assistance Systems (HDAS), an efficient Combined Feature (CF) extraction approach from Contourlet Transform (CT) and Edge Orientation Histogram (EOH) is proposed for vehicle driving posture descriptions. A Random Subspace Ensemble (RSE) of Intersection Kernel Support Vector Machines (IKSVMs) is then exploited as the base classifier. Four testing driving postures are grasping the steering wheel, operating the shift lever, eating a cake, and talking on a cellar phone. On a dedicated Southeast University Driving Posture (SEU-DP) Database, the holdout and cross-validation experiments were conducted. The experimental results show that the proposed CF-RSE approach outperforms single Contourlet-IKSVM, EOH-IKSVM recognition strategies. With CF-RSE, the average classification accuracies of four driving posture classes are over 90%. Among the four classes of driving postures, the class of grasping the steering wheel is the most difficult to recognize and the proposed approach achieved over 85% accuracy in both experiments. These encouraging results show that the proposed CF-RSE approach is effective and hence has great promises in developing a successful HDAS.