A New Approach on Spatio-temporal Scene Analysis for Driver Observation

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems are, due to their potentials regarding security and markets, in the focus of future developments within the automotive industry. The visual observation of the car interior is gaining attention due to the increasing efficiency of methods and technologies in digital image processing. Special weight is put on the visual driver observation, which measures diversion and fatigue of the driver and notifies about endangering behavior. This is accomplished by utilizing complex image-processing systems. The spatial positions and orientations of head and eyes are measured and evaluated. This report presents in detail and coherently the motivation and the current status of available approaches and systems. Following, a new concept for spatio-temporal modeling and tracking of partially rigid objects is developed and described. This concept is based on methods for spatio-temporal scene analysis, graph theory, adaptive information fusion and multi-hypothesis tracking. Our original contributions are the detailed representation of the available procedures and systems in this certain field and the development of a new concept and related prototypes.