A New Method for Classification of Hazardous Driver States Based on Vehicle Kinematics and Physiological Signals

Hazardous driver states are the cause of many traffic accidents, and there is therefore a great need for accurate detection of such states. This study proposes a new classification method that is evaluated on a previously collected driving dataset that includes combinations of four causes of hazardous driver states: drowsiness, high traffic density, adverse weather, and cell phone usage. The previous study consisted of four sessions and eight scenarios within each session. Four physiological signals (e.g. electrocardiogram) and eight vehicle kinematics signals (e.g. throttle, road offset) were recorded during each scenario. In both previous and present studies, the presence or absence of the different causes of hazardous driver states was classified. In this study, a new classifier based on principal component analysis and artificial neural networks is proposed. The obtained results show improvement across all classification accuracies, especially when only vehicle kinematics data are used (mean of 12.7%).