Copyright © 2012 Lisheng Jin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Driver cognitive distraction is a hazard state, which can easily lead to traffic accidents. This study focuses on detecting the driver cognitive distraction state based on driving performance measures. Characteristic parameters could be directly extracted from Controller Area Network-(CAN-)Bus data, without depending on other sensors, which improves real-time and robustness performance. Three cognitive distraction states (no cognitive distraction, low cognitive distraction, and high cognitive distraction) were defined using different secondary tasks. NLModel, NHModel, LHModel, and NLHModel were developed using SVMs according to different states. The developed system shows promising results, which can correctly classify the driver’s states in approximately 74%. Although the sensitivity for these models is low, it is acceptable because in this situation the driver could control the car sufficiently. Thus, driving performance measures could be used alone to detect driver cognitive state.