automotive safety engineers

Abstract: Dashboard-mounted gaze trackers often lose sight of the driver's eyes during large head rotations, including shoulder checks, mirror glances, and intersection scanning. These maneuvers occur when information about the driver's visual attention is most useful. Offline gap-filling methods may reconstruct a missing interval using observations from both sides, but an online driver-monitoring system cannot rely on measurements that have not yet occurred. We therefore formulate causal gaze recovery: forecasting unavailable gaze at time t without target-tracker gaze at t or later. We introduce the Causal Context-Gated Forecaster (CCGF), which encodes a 60-frame pre-dropout history of gaze and head pose and combines it with DINOv3 scene features. A learned reliability gate controls the contribution of the history and scene representations as the dropout progresses. We evaluate two scene conditions: Live, in which the scene representation continues to update during tracker loss, and Frozen, in which the final pre-dropout representation is used throughout the missing interval. We evaluate CCGF on 2,047 eligible, naturally occurring GazeSense head\_lost events drawn from 10.5 h of naturalistic driving by ten drivers. Across all recordings, head\_lost accounts for 8.5 percent of GazeSense recording time. Synchronized gaze coordinates from a head-mounted Neon tracker provide supervision and evaluation targets but are never used as model inputs. Under leave-one-driver-out evaluation, CCGF achieves a mean per-driver median error of 175.7 px (10.5 deg) with Live scene updates, a 33 percent reduction relative to history-only causal forecasting. With Frozen scene input, the error increases to 210.8 px (12.9 deg), indicating that scene observations acquired during the dropout provide useful predictive information. We will release the dataset, evaluation protocol, and causal baselines.

Abstract: Driver gaze provides information regarding driver visual attention and situational awareness to the surrounding traffic. Existing driver gaze estimation studies represent gaze in terms of gaze zone or gaze vector/point-of-gaze (PoG). However, object-level gaze information provides a more semantically meaningful representation of visual attention by identifying attended objects, such as vehicles, pedestrians, or traffic signals. In this study, we propose an end-to-end driver gaze object prediction framework, TransGaze-Object, Transformer-based Gaze Object prediction model. The proposed framework first extracts facial features, including face and iris-weighted eye features, along with trafficobject spatial features. A transformer based cross-attention mechanism is then used to compute similarity scores and attention weights for predicting the drivers gaze object. To train this model, we propose a benchmark driver gaze dataset, Urban Driving-Face Scene Gaze (UD-FSG), comprising synchronized driver-face and traffic-scene images, scene objects bounding boxes, and gaze labels in terms of 2D gaze coordinate and gaze object. The TransGaze-Object model achieves an overall accuracy of 60% for gaze-object prediction, compared to 51% accuracy obtained from associating the estimated Point-of-Gaze to traffic objects. The error analysis reveals that TransGaze-Object reduces confusion between traffic objects (predicted) and the background (ground-truth), achieving an error rate of 11.68%, a 49.7% relative reduction compared with 23.21% error obtained from PoG-based gaze-object association. Overall, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of directly predicting gaze objects from driver-face and traffic-scene information, rather than estimating an intermediate Point-of-Gaze and subsequently associating it with traffic objects.

Abstract: Driver alerting from dashcam video requires sequential decision-making under partial observability: a system must decide not only whether a scene is risky, but also when the evidence is sufficient to warn. Most existing accident anticipation models output a binary risk score, leaving ambiguous scenes to be handled by thresholding. We propose VLAlert, a vision-language alerting framework that casts warning generation as a tri-action policy over SILENT, OBSERVE, and ALERT. The OBSERVE action acts as an internal evidence-gathering decision that delays uncertain warnings and changes the next observation window, creating a lightweight perception-action loop for adaptive alerting. VLAlert uses Qwen3-VL-4B as a safety-evidence generator and pools hidden states from structured belief spans to form compact representations for danger estimation and policy prediction. We evaluate VLAlert on VLAlert-Bench, a unified per-tick benchmark from four real-world dashcam alert datasets, and further test transfer to held-out naturalistic ADAS takeover clips. On VLAlert-Bench validation, VLAlert achieves the highest deployment-oriented utility among tested baselines, with DAUS 0.4878 compared with 0.4752 for Open-BADAS, and improves AUROC, AP_tick, F1_t, and balanced accuracy from 0.610, 0.176, 0.276, and 0.581 to 0.689, 0.195, 0.297, and 0.648, respectively. On 221 held-out ADAS-TO-Critic clips, VLAlert improves R@5s from 74.2% to 88.7% and F1 from 0.585 to 0.686. These results indicate that adaptive observation and safety-focused VLM representations provide measurable gains for driver-facing alert decisions.

Abstract: Driver motion can provide cues to ongoing behavior, attention, and near-term driving intent. However, most existing driver-centric datasets focus on recognizing predefined driver behaviors from short video clips, while human motion forecasting benchmarks largely target motion outside the vehicle. We introduce DriveMotion, a multi-source benchmark for continuous driver motion forecasting. DriveMotion contains 393 hours of 133-keypoint motion sequences at 10 Hz from 360 drivers, integrating naturalistic driving data, curated public in-cabin videos, and the AIDE dataset into a unified representation with per-joint validity masks and synchronized driving context. Naturalistic driving contains long periods of limited body movement, making uniformly sampled evaluation dominated by persistence and less sensitive to brief but behaviorally meaningful motion. To address this, we use dynamics-anchored evaluation, placing forecasting windows around vehicle maneuvers identified offline from CAN signals without providing CAN to the model at inference. Arm motion in pre-maneuver windows is 3.4x greater than in route-matched stable-driving controls. On these anchored windows, learned models reduce forecasting error over persistence by up to 15%, while maneuver-enriched training improves forecast-derived Part-State F1 by 44% over the zero-motion reference. Training on the full multi-source corpus further reduces forecasting error on held-out web drivers by 38% compared with BATON-only training. DriveMotion provides identity-disjoint splits, fixed evaluation subsets, and reference implementations for reproducible evaluation of continuous driver motion forecasting. The dataset and benchmark are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/HenryYHW/DriveMotion

Abstract: Reliable risk assessment remains a central challenge for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Despite advances in automation, passenger cognition provides a non-intrusive auxiliary signal that improves both objective and perceived safety without requiring active human intervention. We introduce an Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) that decodes passenger neural responses for both Risk Prediction (RP) and Danger Identification (DI), explicitly modeling humans as passengers to match real-world AV use. To achieve this, we propose the Passenger Cognitive Model (PCM), Risk-aware Sequential Labeling (RSL), and the Passenger EEG Decoding Strategy (PEDS), which integrates a 3D Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (3D-CRNN) model for joint EEG decoding. Experimental results show that 3D-CRNN achieves a Balanced Accuracy (BA) of $95.3\% \pm 2.7\%$ in RP and improves single-subject DI from $80.9\% \pm 3.9\%$ to $85.0\% \pm 3.2\%$ with RSL. Event-wise analyses further show that 3D-CRNN consistently outperforms other models across different event types in RP and DI. In generalization experiments, 3D-CRNN achieves $77.0\% \pm 5.3\%$ BA in cross-session DI and $77.4\% \pm 1.1\%$ BA on seen subjects in cross-subject evaluation, while maintaining a $64.9\% \pm 8.5\%$ BA on unseen subjects, demonstrating promising generalizability and transferability across both intra-subject and inter-subject variability. These findings establish an Electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding framework for AV passenger hazard perception and suggest that passenger cognitive signals can provide auxiliary supervision for future AV decision-making and Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF) support.