Car camera system detects when you have "road rage", may intervene
We recently highlighted the article, "Forget RFID: Check Out Our Super Trendy Tracked and Traced Future" which examines the ’creepiness’ factor of new wearable technology.This disturbing trend of the personal use of artificial-so-called-’intelligence’ technology is becoming ubiquitous to modern life, and the auto industry is no exception.
The following article from Wired describes new cameras which reportedly determine your emotion based on your facial expression. The cameras will detect ’anger’ or ’disgust’ and determine you’re potentially unsafe to drive. The Wired article points out this type of tech has already been tested for commercial settings:
"It used a camera and infrared light sources to track eye and eyelid behaviour, looking for frequency of blinking, duration of blinks and the velocity of the eyelid for patterns associated with tiredness. Any signs of fatigue would trigger an alarm to wake the driver, and after three strikes the driver’s boss would be alerted."
The camera is touted as being "useful for making people safer drivers".
"Making" people safer? Rather than being encouraged to be safer, or educated and trained to be safer, this would MAKE THEM be safer. That’s on par with an argument that CCTV cameras eliminate crime.
Do the cameras also detect the abhorrence most drivers would feel when being constantly monitored for the slightest flicker of betraying emotion?
More from Wired...
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Car camera system knows when you have road rage
By Olivia Solon | Wired
A team of researchers at EPFL have developed a prototype that uses in-car cameras to analyse drivers’ facial expressions to detect emotion, in particular irritation.
Jean-Philippe Thiran, Hua Goa and Anil Yuce from the Signal Processing 5 Laboratory worked with Peugeot Citroen to develop the emotion detector. Early tests show that the system could be useful for making people safer drivers.Road rage has been found to cause unsafe driving -- between 1990 and 1996 road rage contributed to 12,610 injuries and 218 deaths in the US alone. Finding ways to detect driver irritation with a view to intervene could help reduce this risk.
The prototype comprised of a near infrared camera positioned on the dashboard just above the steering wheel. This would point towards the driver’s face. The driver’s facial features and position are then tracked in real-time, and the expression is then compared to a database of expressions that the system has been taught to recognise, looking out for signs of anger and disgust. The software was trained to do this by first of all analysing photos and videos of people expressing these emotions, using footage taken from inside cars and also from other contexts, such as the office.
Eventually the system was able to detect irritation in the majority of cases. When it failed, it was usually because the way that person expressed irritation was very different from the norm -- people express anger in lots of different ways. The ability to detect irritation will be improved by updating the database of emotion in real time.
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Thiran says that this project is still at an "advanced research stage", but that there is an "emerging consensus that driver monitoring will become highly recommended, if not mandatory, for vehicles with high levels of assistance" -- something that he refers to as "adaptive assistance". The vehicles which assist in this way will be introduced just before fully autonomous ones, he predicts, which will be just before 2020.
Read the full article at: wired.co.uk
