Visidon Driver Monitoring System on Synopsys ARC EV Embedded Vision Processor IP

n traffic, every 24 seconds, a human life is lost. Most accidents are caused by human error, e.g. the driver is either distracted or fatigued. Car manufacturers are now installing Driver Monitoring Systems which can detect impairment and enable appropriate interventions that are driven by regulation and legislation.

Visidon’s Driver Monitoring System (DMS) detects driver drowsiness and distraction which affect driving in order to ensure road safety.

Visidon and Synopsys have collaborated to develop a vehicle safety system to help drivers avoid accidents. The offering, consisting of Visidon DMS technology running on a high-performance Synopsys ARC® EV 7x Processor, will be showcased at the Embedded Vision Summit (https://embeddedvisionsummit.com) during May 16-19 and at the Vehicle Electronics and Connected Services Event (https://insightevents.se/vehicle-electronics-connected-services/) during May 17-18.

Driver Monitoring System

The driver monitoring system, also known as a driver attention monitor, refers to a vehicle safety system that assesses the driver’s alertness, warns the driver if needed, and eventually apply the brakes if the driver fails to do so.

Visidon’s DMS solutions built on the Synopsys ARC EV7x Processor are automatic, unobtrusive, accurate, reliable, and intelligently aware.

Visidon DMS focuses on driver distraction and drowsiness detection by accurately measuring eye openness, eye blink frequency and duration, and head and gaze direction.

Drowsiness and Attentiveness detection: Drowsiness refers to a mental impairment due to  lack of sleep. It is always a long-standing safety issue in transport markets. There are two elements for extracting information about drowsiness and attentiveness. They are- human pose analysis and eye-tracking. Visual AI neural networks are trained for in-vehicle usage and they can be fine-tuned for each driver. Gaze detection is mainly used for detecting driver attentiveness, but it can also control user interfaces for easier interaction between the driver and the vehicle. Our drowsiness detection analyzes eyes and how closed they are. If the eyes are half-open, the driver is more tired. In the same way, it checks the blinks e.g. the longer the blinks last, the more tired the driver is. Visidon also has yawning detection which is used to detect drowsiness.

Synopsys ARC EV Embedded Vision Processor for Automotive

To meet the critical real-time performance requirements, Visidon algorithms are executed on high-performance processor architectures like Synopsys ARC EV7x Processor IP with tightly integrated deep neural network (DNN) engine. Visidon algorithms run on the neural network engine and DSP is used for the basic image processing tasks.

The ARC EV7x Vision Processors’ heterogeneous multicore architecture includes up to four high-performance VPUs. Each EV7x VPU includes a 32-bit scalar unit and a 512-bit wide vector DSP and can be configured for 8-, 16-, or 32-bit operations to perform simultaneous multiply-accumulates on different streams of data. The optional DNN accelerator scales from 880 to 3,520 MACs and employs a specialized architecture for faster memory access, higher performance, and better power efficiency than alternative neural network IP. In addition to supporting convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the DNN accelerator supports batched LSTMs (long short-term memories) for applications that require time-based results, such as predicting the location of a pedestrian based on their observed path and speed. The vision engine and the DNN accelerator work on tasks in parallel, making the EV7x particularly efficient for autonomous vehicles and ADAS applications where vision algorithms operate concurrently.

The Visidon DMS performance estimate on the Synopsys ARC EV72 Processor is 6M cycles/frame processing amounting to 166FPS@1GHZ device.

Visidon’s DMS will also be available on the recently announced Synopsys ARC NPX and NPX FS Neural Processing Unit (NPU) IP (https://www.synopsys.com/designware-ip/processor-solutions/arc-npx-family.html).

Conclusion

In order to guarantee the real-time performance and safety demands, the Driver Monitoring System requires a combination of high-performance and efficient processor architectures supporting complex algorithms. The combination of Synopsys ARC EV7x Processor and Visidon’s DMS helps designers meet these demands for their next generation of automotive designs.