Hand-movement-based in-vehicle driver/front-seat passenger discrimination for centre console controls

摘要

Successful user discrimination in a vehicle environment may yield a reduction of the number of switches, thus significantly reducing costs while increasing user convenience. The personalization of individual controls permits conditional passenger enable/driver disable and vice versa options which may yield safety improvement. The authors propose a prototypic optical sensing system based on hand movement segmentation in near-infrared image sequences implemented in an Audi A6 Avant. Analyzing the number of movements in special regions, the system recognizes the direction of the forearm and hand motion and decides whether driver or front-seat passenger touch a control. The experimental evaluation is performed independently for uniformly and non-uniformly illuminated video data as well as for the complete video data set which includes both subsets. The general test results in error rates of up to 14.41% FPR / 16.82% FNR and 17.61% FPR / 14.77% FNR for driver and passenger respectively. Finally, the authors discuss the causes of the most frequently occurring errors as well as the prospects and limitations of optical sensing for user discrimination in passenger compartments.