CASE STUDY

Dual Camera Driving Safety

for Employee Transportation
Fleet
with
Adobe & Lithium

PREPARED BY: KUMAR RANJAN, VP - STRATEGY &

TELEMATICS
 Executive
Summary
drivebuddyAI is making driving safer using Artificial Intelligence.
Adobe is an US MNC and using Lithium as a fleet partner
provides shared mobility for the employee transportation. To
enhance the on-board safety and monitoring of driver behaviour
the companies led a joint initiative to pilot drivebuddyAI's
solution.

The Gap We're Filling

Adobe along with Lithium urban technologies are using GPS

based tracker and a Camera based SoS for their existing fleets.
The device starts recording the cabin view as soon as the SoS
button gets pressed and the stream can be viewed online by the
fleet manager to take control of the situation. drivebuddyAI with
it's cutting edge AI technology with the dual camera
functionality could provide active collision avoidance as well as
driver drowsiness and distraction alerts in the vehicle directly to
the driver to avoid collisions and enhance on-board safety.

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the staff from Adobe and their Drivers
who  tirelessly  assisted us during the pilot. Special thanks to
Nisarg, Prajjwal, Jaimin, Anurag, Haresh & Madan from
drivebuddyAI team  for taking extra efforts to conduct this pilot
and deriving such insights for the industry. This pilot is one of a
kind in India and I hope this could become a benchmark for
making Indian Roads safer.
www.reallygreatsite.com
 Pilot Program
Main Goal
PROVING A PROOF OF
CONCEPT TO HAVE ACTIVE
DRIVING SAFETY BY USING
ROAD FACING CAMERA AND
DRIVER FACING CAMERA
GENERATING ALERTS ON TIME
TO AVOID COLLISIONS AND
DISTRACTION EVENTS FROM
THE DRIVERS.

Plan of Action

Start a pilot program of nearly one month duration

Install drivebuddyAI devices in two of the selected
vehicles
Pilot to be divided into two Phases- I & II
Phase - I collects data, identify challenges with the
drivers and ususal driving behavior report
Phase - II collects data, generates alerts for the drivers
and monitors the behavior
Conclusion & feedback

www.drivebuddyai.com
PHASE
ONE
DATA COLLECTION, DRIVER
BEHAVIOR AND CHALLENGES

In the month of August, the

drivebuddyAI team installed two of
the vehicles with the dual camera
setup as shown in the image.
The setup installed in a way where Enabling Dual Camera View in a vehicle
one of the camera (mounted below
The cab drivers are habituated to
the rear view mirror) monitors the
use smartphones for navigation
road and the other one (mounted on
which caused obstruction to the
right corner of the driver) monitors
road facing camera view.
the drivers face. Once the vehicle
starts, the device gets turned on and
starts throwing data. The Phase - I was
designed in a way where the devcies
were installed just to monitor the
drivers and were not giving any real
time on board alerts for collision
prevention or distractions. The Phase -
I was supposed to last for one week Driver Manhandling Camera
time with continuous data collection
The drivers do take these kinds of
and analysis on the cloud for the
devices as a spying mechanism on
driver beahavior.
them by the fleet managers. These
Human Challenges kinds of camera makes them
uncomfortable with the fear of
Here are the outcomes from our first
constant monitoring causing them
week of data collection. Unfortunately
to manhandle the devices
the reasons were more of human
than technical.
Infrastructural Challenges
India is facing huge network
congestion issue all over the country.
Specifically in the urban areas the
network congestion causes the
network failure and connectivity issues.
Obstructing View by Phone

www.drivebuddyai.com
When we installed the vehicles in
highly urban areas i.e. Delhi-NCR, very
interesting observation we had was
that in all the traffic jams, the network
used to be congested and loose the
speed and connectivity. This caused an
issue for receiving high volume video
data on time and ultimately resulted in
delayed delivery of cloud based
services. During the times when there
was no connectivity, the cloud
platform showcased the last updated
location and remained the same
because of no updates in the data.
Conclusion Week - 1
In the first week of installation, we
faced many challenges including
driver manhandling, obstruction for
camera, network challenges. This
resulted in poor data collection, which
made no sense.
We called it off and decided to restart
Phase - I again.
Phase - I Restart
India is a country where we as drivers
are not used to have any kind of
assistance in the vehicle. We are less
used to the technology around us and
so for the cab drivers it is expected that
they don't attend to any aftermarket
technology. This is a serious challenge
and we decided to take it on by talking
to drivers about the device and its
functionality. Explaining them about
the device and the functionality. Ergo,
came driver training as a value add.
We also faced an issue about the
changing (unauthorised) drivers. Being
a driver observation platform, to
prepare a report on a particular driver
and the driving  amount of time must
be sufficient
www.drivebuddyai.com
enough. We requested the fleet
manager to arrange for two drivers
only in a day and those drivers should
not be changed during the course of
the pilot.
The car was being driven by two of the
drivers, day shift and night shift drivers.
Day shift started from 4pm to 9pm and
night shift started from 9pm to 8am till
the next morning. We were provided
with all the driver details for making
reports accordingly along with photo
ID.
The Phase lasted for almost two weeks
where the data was collected from the
single vehicle from both the devices.
Here are few findings from the data
analyzed.
Camera Misalignment
This was one of the biggest hurdle in
executing successful driver facing
algorithm in running vehicle where
drivers used to disalign the camera
from it's actual viewing position,
causing the wrong detection.
Driver Facing Camera Misalignment
When this misalignment was
identified, and the drivers were asked
about the issue, the issue was IR light
for night vision. Here was the challenge
where majority of drowsiness and
distractions happened during the
night and the  night-vision  IR caused
issue for the drivers.
Unauthenticated Drivers
This was one of the features we
developed and implemented during
the pilot phase. We had good data for
the driver faces and we took 10
pictures from phone too from different
angles for both the drivers. We applied Driver Distracted driving on 30th Aug 7:29 am
our face recognition AI model to all the
driver face data we received from the Driver Evaluation
device and identified three instances
Driver - 1
when other drivers were driving the
vehicle. This feature is very much
important and value addition for the
fleet manager to identify and get
notification of driver changes.

Driver Score during the Pilot Phase

Total Events Captured

1. Distraction --> 342
2. Forward Collision --> 501
3. Over speeding --> 61
4. Hard Acceleration --> 462
Different drivers identified on 23rd/24th/26th
Aug 2019

Distraction Events Identified

Driver Distracted Talking on the Phone in the

night time driving on 5th Sept 2019 at 22:06

In the post analytics of the Phase-II

when the data analysis detected few of
the distraction events as displayed in
the picture when the vehicle is
moving. These are helpful insight
about the drivers and for driver
training.

www.drivebuddyai.com
Driver - 2

Driver Score during the Pilot Phase

Total Events Captured

1. Distraction --> 387
2. Forward Collision --> 770
3. Over speeding --> 9
4. Hard Acceleration --> 260

www.drivebuddyai.com
PHASE
TWO
ALERTS ENABLED FOR
FORWARD COLLISION & DRIVER
DISTRACTION ON DEVICE
The Phase - II of the pilot started on
the 30th Sept 2019. The Phase - I
concluded well with the all the
challenges faced already. The
technology as well as the reliability
and capacity of the products was
tested too. The hardware improved
in the Phase - II as well which could
work better on the long journeys
doing on-device inference.
The Phase started with initial testing
of the functionality with admin team
along with the driver.
Day - 1
The day - 1 was decided to test the
road facing camera and the
functionality. Here are the
conclusions from the admin team.
www.drivebuddyai.com
Enabling Dual Camera View in a vehicle
1. The performance of device was
dependable
2. Alerts were received upon nearing
any other moving or stationed
object (car, bike, auto, bus, etc.) at
any speed above 5 kmph
3. We observed that alert was
immediately received within a
couple of seconds and system was
giving time of around 2-3 seconds
to avoid the collision
Day - 2
The day - 2 was decided to test driver
facing camera functionality along with
already tested road facing camera
functionality. Here are the details of
admin feedback.
1. The performance of front camera
was not satisfactory
2. Alerts were not consistent and
were received at a lag of 10-15
seconds from the time of
distraction observed from driver
3. Consistency of alert was even
more poor while driver turned his
face towards left side or upwards
Day - 3
The day - 2 turned out to be a bit of
disappointment for the product and
performance where it didn't do well
in the testing.
The reason was still unidentified, We
worked out on a solution and then
tried again for the testing.
This time the vehicle was taken on
an empty area where there were no
outside objects and testing could be
carried out without any causality
caused to the vehicle.
Test Scenario - 1 - Testing Left
Distraction
The test was carried out by
making driver to put the vehicle
on a fixed speed and then made
him look at the left side
continuously for 5-10 seconds.
The vehicle was controlled by one
of the admin with Hand brake
and steering wheel.
The device did buzz but with
certain delay and was not upto
the mark.
Test Scenario - 2 - Testing Right
Distraction
The test was carried out by
making driver to put the vehicle
on a fixed speed and then made
him look at the right side
continuously for 5-10 seconds.
The vehicle was controlled by one
of the admin with Hand brake
and steering wheel.
The device did not generate any
alert.
www.drivebuddyai.com
Test Scenario - 3 - Testing Upward
Direction
The test was carried out by
making driver to put the vehicle
on a fixed speed and then made
him look at the downward
continuously for 5-10 seconds.
The vehicle was controlled by one
of the admin with Hand brake
and steering wheel.
The device did generate few alert
sounds but was not satisfactory
enough for creating user
experience as it looked like false
alarms which generated after few
seconds of the event happened.
Test Scenario - 4 - Testing
Drowsiness
The test was carried out by
making driver to put the vehicle
on a fixed speed and then made
to close the eyes continuously for
2-3 seconds.
The vehicle was controlled by one
of the admin with Hand brake
and steering wheel.
The device did not generate alerts
and didn't work satisfactorily.
Conclusion
The Phase - II of the pilot was deciding enough that the functionality expected
was not achieved with 100% success rate. There many reasons behind it but it
turned out to be a great learning experience for the team trying to achieve
something which a very few organizations have tried and achieved significant
success.

The learnings were technical from the algorithms to the hardware. The learning
of operations of running and executing successful pilot which can turn out to be
a successful in Indian market was significant too. The learning of deploying an
active component in the vehicle which is definitely not for monitoring but
intended to interact with the driver where drivers have to get benefit out of it.

Technology Learning/Challenges:
Indian traffic conditions are very different than foreign traffic conditions which
are highly organized specifically in US, Japan, Europe.
Creating an AI which can work on Indian context is very complex task
considering variety of probabilities, changing in each city. For example the
Noida region has battery operated auto-rickshaws which are only limited to
urban North India.
The traffic movement on Indian city roads where employee transportation
cabs run are highly dense and creates problem in road facing camera for
generating alerts, as the vehicles run too slow and too near (bumper to
bumper traffic). Generating alerts in traffic scenarios will be annoying for the
drivers and passengers too but though the vehicle remains prone to crash if
the safe distance is not maintained.
The hardware required to run the inference must be reliable enough to run
through long times continuously.
The reason why driver distraction algorithm failed during the testing but
worked on solo testing was, "The testing was carried out with the vehicle
fully occupied, having three person sitting at the back, the driver facing
camera did detected the other faces too in the image frame received
and resulted in confusions for generating alerts and though resulted in
failure."

www.drivebuddyai.com
ADOPTION OF ACTIVE SAFETY SYSTEM IN VEHICLES - INDIAN
MARKET PERSPECTIVE
Indian fleet management industry has evolved since last few years with huge
adoption of GPS based tracking systems.
Next phase of adoption came in late 2010s was OBD - II based devices
including GPS tracking.
Indian government made it mandatory for all commercial vehicles to have
GPS based tracking systems after increase in cab aggregation business from
uber & ola like companies in late 2017.
The GPS tracking systems are certified with AIS140 which is also a mandate
for commercial vehicles.
Indian fleet management systems are highly tracking based where
monitoring of the drivers is thought to be important and any misbehaviour from
drivers lead to the cuts in wages. This is helpful in a way where drivers tend to
cause damage to the systems installed in the vehicle meant for tracking.

For active safety devices, the different type of mindset is required from the fleet
managers as well as from the drivers. Indian ecosystem is less sensitive about
the safety where preventive mechanism is not easily accepted. Another
important aspect is about drivers where majority of drivers do not have
habit of any kind of assistance in the vehicle where they tend to listen to
certain assistance and act on it accordingly.

Now the world is heading towards the era of Artificial Intelligence and data
centric approach where data and insights can help making decisions for
organizations.

At drivebuddyAI, we are working towards making an active safety systems for

vehicles to making Indian ecosystem smarter and safer enabled with data in
running operations for the fleets/logistics companies.

The approach would be to get insights from the drivers from the device,
analyze the driving pattern, annotate the data, train the AI models, validate
and then upgrade the hardware back again with learned intelligence from
thousonds of drivers.

This will lead to autonomy in the upcoming future where India will too lead the
race in the Autonomous Systems globally by solving the most complex traffic
ecosystem.

www.drivebuddyai.com