Learning to detect phone-related pedestrian distracted behaviors with synthetic data

Due to the popularity and mobility of smart phones, phone-related pedestrian distracted behaviors, e.g., Texting, Game Playing, and Phone calls, have caused many traffic fatalities and accidents. As an advanced driver-assistance or autonomous-driving system, computer vision could be used to automatically detect distractions from cameras installed on the vehicle for useful safety intervention. The state-of-the-art method models this problem as a standard supervised learning method with a two-branch Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) followed by a voting on all image frames. In contrast, this paper proposes a new synthetic dataset named SYN-PPDB (448 synchronized video pairs of 53, 760 computer game images) for this research problem and models it as a transfer learning problem from synthetic data to real data. A new deep learning model embedded with spatial-temporal feature learning and pose-aware transfer learning is proposed. Experimental results show that we could improve the state-of-the-art overall recognition accuracy from 84.27% to 96.67%.