Introduction

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The Driver Status Monitoring (DSM) scenario was added to the Euro NCAP vehicle assessment in 2023. It is also an assessment area covered by GSR2 (where it is referred to as Advanced Driver Distraction Warning or ADDW), to be assessed on all new vehicle types from June 2024.

Historically, this test was performed on the test track and then post-processed offline by syncing uncoupled camera sources, which could take hours of post-processing time. The VBOX Automotive solution uses separate online and offline assessments to speed up the analysis and reduce the post-processing by a significant amount.

The DSM assessment scenario looks at how the vehicle reacts to the driver being distracted from the driving task. A vehicle equipped with a Driver Status Monitoring system will activate a vehicle warning after a specified delay from detecting the driver’s distraction from the road ahead.

Unlike historical Occupant Status Monitoring systems, which looked at indirect monitoring methods, such as measuring entropy within the steering wheel, to make a judgement on whether the driver is distracted or tired; direct driver monitoring can instantly decide if the driver is distracted from the driving task.

For direct monitoring systems, such as those assessed by Euro NCAP, the driver gaze position is monitored by an onboard face-tracking camera system. The functionality of this system must be assessed without accessing the vehicle CAN. As such the VBOX Automotive DSM assessment uses VBOX HD2 cameras seeded with 100 Hz data fed via a VBOX data logger that is independent to the vehicle CAN.

The test is performed in two steps, first in Online mode in VBOX Test Suite and then in Offline mode in VBOX Test Suite. Online mode will provide instant pass/fail results for the majority of test runs. leaving only the edge cases that are very close to the pass/fail criteria which you will have to post-process in Offline mode. Both steps are covered in this guide.

In Online mode, you can view and analyse the 100 Hz data from the VBOX directly in VBOX Test Suite for an instant and accurate assessment. In Offline mode (post processing), the 100 Hz data is sent over CAN from the VBOX and captured in the fully synchronised HD2 files.