MIDriveSafely: Multimodal Interaction for Drive Safely

Denis Ivanko, Alexey M. Kashevnik, Dmitry Ryumin, Andrey Kitenko, Alexandr Axyonov, Igor Lashkov, Alexey Karpov

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel multimodal interaction application to help car drivers and increase their road safety. MIDriveSafely is a mobile application that provides the following functions: (1) detect dangerous situations based on video information from a smartphone front-facing camera, such as drowsiness/sleepiness, phone usage while driving, eating, smoking, unfastened seat belt, etc.; gives a feedback to the driver (2) provide entertainment (e.g. rock-paper-scissors game, based on automatic speech recognition), (3) provide voice control capabilities to navigation/multimedia systems of a smartphone (potentially vehicle systems such as lighting conditions/climate control). Speech recognition in driving conditions is highly challenging due to acoustic noises, active head turns, pose variations, distance to recording devices, etc. MIDriveSafely incorporates driver's audio-visual speech recognition (DAVIS) system and uses it for multimodal interaction. Along with this, the original DriveSafely system is used for dangerous state detection. MIDriveSafely improves upon existing driver monitoring applications using multimodal (mainly audio-visual) information. MIDriveSafely motivates people to drive in a safer manner by providing the feedback to the drivers and by creating a fun user experience.