Smartphone-based outlier detection: a complex event processing approach for driving behavior detection

Abstract The majority of fatal car crashes are caused by reckless driving. With the sophistication of vehicle instrumentation, reckless maneuvers, such as abrupt turns, acceleration, and deceleration, can now be accurately detected by analyzing data related to the driver-vehicle interactions. Such analysis usually requires very specific in-vehicle hardware and infrastructure sensors (e.g. loop detectors and radars), which can be costly. Hence, in this paper, we investigated if off-the-shelf smartphones can be used to online detect and classify the driver’s behavior in near real-time. To do so, we first modeled and performed an intrinsic evaluation to assess the performance of three outlier detection algorithms formulated as a data stream processing network which receives as input and processes data streams of smartphone and vehicle sensors. Next, we implemented a novel scoring mechanism based on online outlier detection to quantitatively evaluate drivers’ maneuvers as either cautious or reckless. Thus, we adapted a data mining mechanism which takes into account a sensor’s data rates and power to determine driver behavior in the scoring process. Finally, as the intrinsic evaluation does not necessarily reveal how well an algorithm will perform in a real-world scenario, we evaluated the algorithm that achieved the best result in a real-world case study to assess drivers’ driving behavior. Our results indicate that the algorithm performs quickly and accurately; the algorithm classifies driver behavior with 95.45% accuracy. Moreover, such results are obtained within 100 milliseconds of processing time on average