Scientists come up with system that ‘sees’ when a driver calls

Researchers at Brazil’s Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina have devised a system to prevent drivers from picking up a phone while driving. The system works with a camera in the dashboard.

Drivers continuously look around them while driving, but they mainly stare ahead when making a call, according to the researchers. This keeps them sitting still, which would make it easy for an underlying algorithm to analyze whether someone is holding a phone.

The scientists wrote software that analyzes the photos from the dashboard camera in three steps. First, the program selects the face and two areas around the face, which are intended to detect any hands next to the head. It then simplifies the pixels by ‘coloring’ only the skin and then checks the position of each pixel. Finally, the software determines whether someone is holding a phone by looking at the number of colored pixels in the frames intended for the hands.

The researchers tested their algorithm on two hundred subjects, half of whom had a telephone. With each driver, the software shot five videos, each three seconds long. This happened at fifteen frames per second and a resolution of 320×240 pixels. In total, the software knew in more than 87 percent of the cases whether someone was answering a phone. The idea is that by then playing a sound, someone could be prevented from making a call.

Although the experiment shows that software can help to check whether someone is calling in the car, it is far from certain whether the software will ever be found in a consumer car. This is because there are some important snags, as MIT Technology Review rightly notes. One is the question of whether such a system makes sense, because there may always be the urge to keep calling in the car. In addition, it is of course also not certain whether someone wants to buy a car with a camera that continuously monitors it.