Cell phone usage detection in roadway images: from plate recognition to violation classification

Abstract

Distracted driving plays a significant role in road accidents worldwide. Detecting distracted driving in real time is a significant challenge faced by law enforcement officers. Although efforts are continuing to identify this type of infraction in an automated manner, most of the techniques proposed for this problem use images obtained internally from vehicles. Few studies have looked into using roadway images collected in naturalistic situations. We propose in this research a complete and fully automated deep-learning approach that locates vehicles in roadway images, detects and extracts license plate numbers, detects the windshield region, and classifies images into predefined violations. The proposed approach is complete in that it does not rely on roadway license plate systems to localize the vehicle of interest and extract the license plate numbers. The model performance-both overall and in each stage-was evaluated, achieving 90 % overall classification accuracy. The model is trained and tested on a real-world local dataset of 10,000 images. The dataset used in this study is the first dataset acquired from roadway license plate cameras in the Middle Eastern region showing unique variations of plate forms, driving habits, regional attire, and weather conditions.