ipylot: Intelligent co-pilot for drivers

Ipylot (ipylot.com) is a vision-based in-car driver assistance system that is designed to improve driving effectiveness, initially focused on providing real-time feedback on alertness. In the future, ipylot’s capabilities will be extended to include assistive capabilities and personalization based on driver and passenger emotion detection, driving habits, history, real-time traffic, and preferences.

Why is it important?

• Distracted driving via cell phone use, is a major cause of accidents, causing 1.6 M crashes per year out of 6 M yearly accidents in US (reference)

• Nearly 390,000 injuries occur each year from accidents caused by texting while driving

• Reaching for something in backseat, operating other electronics etc. can cause accidents also

• Drowsy driving accounts for 100,000 crashes per year, and 1,550 fatalities

• While there is a lot of potential to cater to the untapped market of improving passenger convenience through vision inference, our initial focus is on safety

Our team’s project is a prototype for ipylot and the goal is to develop and deploy Deep Learning models in the car to detect and alert drowsy and distracted drivers. We concentrated on the software solution, and less so on the hardware solution. The system was prototyped on a Jetsan device.