Enhancing Road Safety through Machine Learning for Prediction of Unsafe Driving Behaviors

Road accidents pose a significant threat, leading to fatalities and injuries with far-reaching consequences. This study addresses two crucial challenges in road safety: analyzing traffic intersections to enhance safety by predicting potentially risky situations, and monitoring driver activity to prevent distracted driving accidents. Focusing on Virginia's intersections, we thoroughly examine traffic participant interactions to identify and mitigate conflicts, employing graph-based modeling of traffic scenarios to evaluate contributing parameters. Additionally, we leverage graph neural networks to detect and track potential crash situations from intersection videos, offering practical recommendations to enhance intersection safety. To understand the causes of risky behavior, we specifically investigate accidents resulting from distracted driving, which has become more prevalent due to advanced driver assistance systems in semi-autonomous vehicles. For monitoring driver activity inside vehicles, we propose the use of Video Transformers on challenging secondary driver activity datasets, incorporating grayscale and low-quality data to overcome limitations in capturing overall image context. Finally, we validate our predictions by studying attention modules and introducing explainability into the computer vision model. This research contributes to improving road safety by providing comprehensive analysis and recommendations for intersection safety enhancement and prevention of distracted driving accidents.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Sonth, Akash Prakash

Chairs dc:contributor.committeechair

• Abbott, Amos L.
• Sarkar, Abhijit

Committee member dc:contributor.committeemember

• Jones, Creed F. III

• traffic safety
• graph neural network
• distraction monitoring
• transformers

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:38276

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/116073