D³-Guard: Acoustic-based Drowsy Driving Detection Using Smartphones

Since the number of cars has grown rapidly in recent years, driving safety draws more and more public attention. Drowsy driving is one of the biggest threatens to driving safety. Therefore, a simple but robust system that can detect drowsy driving with commercial off-the-shelf devices (such as smart-phones) is very necessary. With this motivation, we explore the feasibility of purely using acoustic sensors embedded in smart-phones to detect drowsy driving. We first study characteristics of drowsy driving, and find some unique patterns of Doppler shift caused by three typical drowsy behaviors, i.e., nodding, yawning and operating steering wheel. We then validate our important findings through empirical analysis of the driving data collected from real driving environments. We further propose a real-time Drowsy Driving Detection system (D³-Guard) based on audio devices embedded in smartphones. In order to improve the performance of our system, we adopt an effective feature extraction method based on undersampling technique and FFT, and carefully design a high-accuracy detector based on LSTM networks for the early detection of drowsy driving. Through extensive experiments with 5 volunteer drivers in real driving environments, our system can distinguish drowsy driving actions with an average total accuracy of 93.31% in real-time. Over 80% drowsy driving actions can be detected within first 70% of action duration.