An AI Approach for Automatic Detection of Driver Distractions in United Arab Emirates: A Step Towards Vision Zero

The Vision Zero strategy is a comprehensive roadmap designed to achieve the goal of zero severe injuries and fatalities. This strategy involves a holistic approach that involves developing infrastructure, policy, and technology to create a safe and sustainable transport system. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as in other countries across the globe, distraction is considered one of the leading causes of road accidents, emphasizing the need for measures to address this issue. Various technologies, such as the Vehicular Attention and Safety Tracker (VAST) have been successfully implemented to promote safe driving practices and reduce accidents. However, these systems have limitations in identifying severe instances of distracted driving, duration of the behaviour, and driver versus passenger distinction. The system needs to be improved by adding new classes and integrating advanced algorithms to make it more reliable and faster. 

To achieve this, the proposed system aims to use a “Segmenting Anything Models (SAM)” approach, and a You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLOv8) vision-based system to detect distracted-driving behaviour in the road. The system will collect data from multiple roadside cameras with robust privacy controls, and will process it for the detection of distracted behaviour, as well as the duration of which the driver was distracted. This is a significant contribution to currently used systems, which only detects a snap of distracted-driving behaviour, and does not quantify the severity of such acts on the basis of how long was the driver distracted. By detecting and quantifying distracted driving behaviour, the system will be able to alert authorities of the severity of such acts, to report on annual road safety KPIs, and also to monitor and guide interventions for preventing accidents. Overall, the proposed system can play a vital role in collecting data related to Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs), for the purpose of reducing road accidents and fatalities, ultimately helping the UAE achieve its Vision Zero goal of zero severe injuries and fatalities. 

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Contributors:  

• Dr. Hamad Aljassmi , Associate Professor – UAEU

• Dr. Fady Alnajjar, Associate Professor – UAEU 

• Prof. Vinayak Dixit, Professor – University of New South Wales 

• Dr. Mr. Luqman Ali, Research Associate – UAEU