3D skeleton aware driver behavior recognition framework for autonomous driving system

Abstract

The recognition of the driver’s behaviors inside an autonomous vehicle can effectively address emergency handling in autonomous driving and is crucial for ensuring the driver’s safety. Driver behavior recognition is a challenging task due to factors such as variations, diversities, complexities, and strong interferences in behaviors. In this paper, to realize the application in the autonomous driving scenes, a novel 3D skeleton aware behavior recognition framework is proposed to recognize various driver behaviors in autonomous driving systems. First, a 3D human pose estimation network (Pose-GTFNet) with temporal Transformer and spatial graph convolutional network (GCN) is designed to infer 3D human poses from 2D pose sequences. Second, based on the obtained 3D human pose sequences, a behavior recognition network (Beh-MSFNet) with multi-skeleton feature fusion is designed to recognize driver behaviors. In the experiments, the Pose-GTFNet and Beh-MSFNet can get the best performance compared with most state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on the Human3.6M human pose dataset, JHMDB and SHREC action recognition dataset, respectively. In addition, the proposed driver behavior recognition framework can achieve SOTA performance on the Drive&Act and Driver-Skeleton driver behavior datasets.