**Human Automotive Interaction: Affect Recognition for Motor Trend Magazine's Best Driver Car of the Year Human Automotive Interaction: Affect Recognition for Motor Trend Magazine's Best Driver Car of the Year**

Albert C. Cruz, Bir Bhanu and Belinda T. Le Albert C. Cruz, Bir Bhanu and Belinda T. Le

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/65635

#### **Abstract**

Observation analysis of vehicle operators has the potential to address the growing trend of motor vehicle accidents. Methods are needed to automatically detect heavy cognitive load and distraction to warn drivers in poor psychophysiological state. Existing methods to monitor a driver have included prediction from steering behavior, smart phone warn‐ ing systems, gaze detection, and electroencephalogram. We build upon these approaches by detecting cues that indicate inattention and stress from video. The system is tested and developed on data from Motor Trend Magazine's Best Driver Car of the Year 2014 and 2015. It was found that face detection and facial feature encoding posed the most dif‐ ficult challenges to automatic facial emotion recognition in practice. The chapter focuses on two important parts of the facial emotion recognition pipeline: (1) face detection and (2) facial appearance features. We propose a face detector that unifies state‐of‐the‐art approaches and provides quality control for face detection results, called reference‐based face detection. We also propose a novel method for facial feature extraction that com‐ pactly encodes the spatiotemporal behavior of the face and removes background texture, called local anisotropic‐inhibited binary patterns in three orthogonal planes. Real‐world results show promise for the automatic observation of driver inattention and stress.

**Keywords:** facial emotion recognition, local appearance features, face detection
