Real-Time Vehicle Maneuvering Detection With Digital Compass

Abstract

Vehicle maneuverings are important pieces of information for many applications such as traffic incident detection and driving behavior recognition. On a macroscopic level, an unusually large number of some maneuvering events (e.g., lane changes) may suggest that a road incident occurs. On a microscopic level, vehicle maneuverings can tell how each individual person drives (e.g., safely or unsafely). A number of smartphone-based maneuvering detection methods have been proposed. However, most of them typically rely on accelerometer and gyroscope, and thus require the smartphone to be placed at a specific position on a vehicle and in a specific orientation. In this work, we take a rather different approach from most of the existing methods. Particularly, we investigate how effective it is to detect vehicle maneuverings by relying only on a signal from a digital compass on a smartphone. To this end, we introduce a simple rule-based maneuvering detection method which only takes the heading angles measured by the digital compass as inputs. This allows the smartphone to be placed freely at any position on the vehicle and in any orientation. Our results show that the digital compass can be used to detect turns and u-turns extremely well, and its accuracy on lane change detection is at an acceptable level.