i3 - November/December 2018 - 22

would receive first shipments of DRIVE
Xavier early this year.
In fact, AI is a "very pragmatic" way to
understand both the driver's engagement
and the context in which he's operating,
says VSI Labs' Magney. "You can pick up
on many different attributes and many different elements." But the technology's need
for training data is never-ending and
"nothing is ever finished," he adds.
For Eyeris, a four-year-old Palo Alto,
CA, company specializing in deep learning-based emotion recognition software,
the pursuit of driver monitoring discussions emerged early to much skepticism as
well as interest, says Founder and CEO
Modar Alaoui. He first presented "driver
monitoring that incorporates emotional
distraction as a measure for determining
cognitive workload" at the 2014 TU
Automotive conference in Detroit, when
driver monitoring focused only on eye gaze
and head position tracking technology. He
adds, "We argued that is not enough to
determine attention or distraction because
a person can still be looking at the right
spot, their eyes are open and their head is
still in the right direction, but they could
be highly emotionally distracted."
22

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018

"By mating
action,
activity
and body
tracking
with face
analytics,
we derive
a wholistic
interpretation of the
human
behavior
inside the
vehicle."
Modar Alaoui
Founder & CEO
Eyeris

In 2017, Eyeris began working on emotional AI for monitoring a person's face
and upper body region employing standard (2D) cameras and showcased this
technology at CES 2018 in a Tesla Model
S demo car equipped with five cameras
that track the driver and all passengers.
"We also released an algorithm for
action recognition and activity prediction, which uses body tracking as a prerequisite," Alaoui says. It recognizes, for
instance, that the driver is smoking,
texting, eating or drinking. Although
the driver's head and eyes are looking at
the right place, he might be reaching
out to the glove box or trying to open a
bottle of water, which of course translates to distraction.
"By mating action, activity and body
tracking with face analytics, we derive a
wholistic interpretation of the human
behavior inside the vehicle," he says. A
higher layer of algorithms called a decision-making AI engine then responds to
this interpretation and informs the vehicle - allowing it to passively or actively
react, such as by readying a collision
avoidance technology to take over.
Further, Eyeris' technology predicts
imminent distraction on a second-bysecond basis, Alaoui says.
Beyond safety, Alaoui anticipates
Eyeris' technology could be used in
shared self-driving cars to tailor vehicle
performance and interior and infotainment features - including the suspension's ride quality, ambient lighting and
streamed content - corresponding to
the number of passengers and their genders, ages, activities and moods.
"The future of mobility is going to
depend hugely on human-centric data
in the ridership economy," he declares.
"This is really going to change transportation as we know it."
While vehicles like the Tesla Model 3
and the 2018 Cadillac CT6 today have
one camera in the cabin to watch the
driver alone, "future generations of vehicles are going to have an average of

I T I S I N N O VAT I O N
http://www.eyeris.ai
i3 - November/December 2018

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