Robust Seatbelt Detection and Usage Recognition for Driver Monitoring Systems
This work addresses safety issues in automotive systems by improving seatbelt detection to prevent injuries, though it is incremental as it builds on existing monitoring technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of accurately detecting seatbelt usage in driver monitoring systems, addressing challenges like low contrast and occlusions, and introduces a framework that achieves robust performance across different camera modalities.
Wearing a seatbelt appropriately while driving can reduce serious crash-related injuries or deaths by about half. However, current seatbelt reminder system has multiple shortcomings, such as can be easily fooled by a "Seatbelt Warning Stopper", and cannot recognize incorrect usages for example seating in front of a buckled seatbelt or wearing a seatbelt under the arm. General seatbelt usage recognition has many challenges, to name a few, lacking of color information in Infrared (IR) cameras, strong distortion caused by wide Field of View (FoV) fisheye lens, low contrast between belt and its background, occlusions caused by hands or hair, and imaging blurry. In this paper, we introduce a novel general seatbelt detection and usage recognition framework to resolve the above challenges. Our method consists of three components: a local predictor, a global assembler, and a shape modeling process. Our approach can be applied to the driver in the Driver Monitoring System (DMS) or general passengers in the Occupant Monitoring System (OMS) for various camera modalities. Experiment results on both DMS and OMS are provided to demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed approach.