Classification of Driver's Neutral and Cognitive Distraction States Based on Peripheral Vehicle Behavior in Driver's Gaze Transition

To support safe driving, numerous methods of detecting distractions using measurements of a driver's gaze have been proposed. These methods empirically focused on certain driving contexts and analyzed gaze behavior under particular peripheral vehicle conditions; therefore, numerous driving situations were not considered. To address this problem with hypothesis-testing approaches, we turn the problem around and propose a data-mining approach that analyzes peripheral vehicle behavior during gaze transitions of drivers in order to compare their neutral driving state with a cognitive distraction state. This change in thinking is the first contribution of this paper. The analysis results show that under the neutral condition, drivers generally turned their gaze to peripheral vehicles to be focused on; however, they did not do this consistently under the distracted condition. As the second contribution, we propose a simple classifier to discriminate between the cognitive distraction and neutral states by analyzing the peripheral vehicle behavior. The proposed classifier can manage various situations and provide high classification accuracy by focusing on gaze transitions from the front view toward other directions.