Caught You Phone-Handed

• Rachel Estilo
• Deepesh Ganguli
• Sugra Hoshino
• Santan Settipalli

While smartphone use has greatly enhanced our driving experience, it can also be distracting for drivers and cause potential danger for other drivers as well. According to the National Safety Council, cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year on average. To put a stop to this, we envisioned an easy-to-install device that would enable traffic authorities to know when an individual was using a hand-held device while driving on the road. The product would ideally be compact, easy to maintain and cheap, in order for it to have a competitive advantage over the market. Our product will detect phone usage among drivers through live video processing. To ensure the device is energy efficient, we will use a motion sensor to trigger the camera to turn on only when it detects a vehicle in motion and feed the live video to our Neural Network framework. It will then check for drivers using phones. Once such a driver is detected, the device stores the relevant information(frame capture of driver and license plate) in an onboard storage device. The device will be able to process video during the day and at night as well using adaptive brightness as per our engineering standards.

See supporting documentation in the team’s Box drive.