U2-Net: A Very-Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Detecting Distracted Drivers

In recent years, the number of deaths and injuries resulting from traffic accidents has been increasing dramatically all over the world due to distracted drivers. Thus, a key element in developing intelligent vehicles and safe roads is monitoring driver behaviors. In this paper, we modify and extend the U-net convolutional neural network so that it provides deep layers to represent image features and yields more precise classification results. It is the basis of a very deep convolution neural network, called U2-net, to detect distracted drivers. The U2-net model has two paths (contracting and expanding) in addition to a fully-connected dense layer. The contracting path is used to extract the context around the objects to provide better object representation while the symmetric expanding path enables precise localization. The motivation behind this model is that it provides precise object features to provide a better object representation and classification. We used two public datasets: MI-AUC and State Farm, to evaluate the U2 model in detecting distracted driving. The accuracy of U2-net on MI-AUC and State Farm is 98.34 % and 99.64%, respectively. These evaluation results show higher accuracy than achieved by many other state-of-the-art methods.