HYDERABAD: Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad are using artificial intelligence (AI) based algorithms to detect mobile phone usage among drivers.
The distraction caused due to the usage of mobile phones during driving is one of the major factors behind the increasing number of road accidents. Researchers have used algorithms based on deep-learning to detect mobile-phone usage on a dataset. The algorithm runs at nearly 27 frames-per-second on a high-end graphics processing unit (GPU), which means it can process a video in real-time.
Dr. Sparsh Mittal, the lead researcher, said, “We believe that our technique has immense potential. It can help in avoiding accidents due to distraction during driving. It can help improve productivity by preventing excess or untimely usage of the mobile phone.”
The algorithm can also help track mobiles being used at restricted places or lost phones. Explaining, Mittal said mobile phones are prohibited in many places such as petrol pumps, exam halls, embassies, military bases, and courts of law, and their tool can be used to find whether the mobile phone is being used in such areas. “Many financial transactions now happen on mobile phones, and hence, the loss of mobile phones can have severe consequences. By allowing tracking of mobile phones, our technique can help in detecting loss or theft of the mobile phone,” said Mittal.
Elaborating on this research, Poonam Rajput, research scholar at IITH, said, “ We have used algorithms based on deep-learning to detect mobile-phone usage. Our fastest algorithm runs at nearly 27 frames-per-second on a high-end GPU, which means it can process a video in real-time. Our algorithms achieve nearly 99% accuracy on the Kaggle Driver dataset and 96% accuracy on the IITH-DMU dataset. Our work is the first to detect mobile phones’ usage in both indoor and outdoor environments with a lot of clutter.”
