Recognition of driving postures by contourlet transform and random forests

An efficient feature extraction approach for driving postures from a video camera, which consists of Homomorphic filtering, skin-like regions segmentation and contourlet transform (CT), was proposed. With features extracted from a driving posture dataset created at Southeast University (SEU), holdout and cross-validation experiments on driving posture classification were then conducted using random forests (RF) classifier. Compared with a number of commonly used classification methods including linear perceptron classifier, k-nearest-neighbour classifier and multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier, the experiments results showed that the RF classifier offers the best classification performance among the four classifiers. Among the four predefined classes, that is, grasping the steering wheel, operating the shift gear, eating and talking on a cellular phone, the class of eating is the most difficult to classify. With RF classifier, the classification accuracies of eating are over 88% in holdout and cross-validation experiments, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed feature extraction method and the importance of RF classifier in automatically understanding and characterising driver's behaviours towards human-centric driver assistance systems.