Abnormal Driving Behavior Detection: A Machine and Deep Learning Based Hybrid Model

Car accidents remain a leading cause of unintentional fatalities, with many incidents stemming from driver behaviors that impact vehicle control, such as steering, braking, accelerating, and gear shifting. Activities like searching for items, using mobile devices, or listening to the radio can distract drivers visually, audibly, and physically, posing significant risks to road safety. While various methods have been developed to detect such distractions, their effectiveness often falls short in real-world applications. This paper introduces a novel approach that combines machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques to identify both safe and risky driving behaviors. Six ML classifiers were evaluated on real-world data to distinguish between driving behaviors such as aggressive, fatigued, and normal driving, with the Random Forest classifier demonstrating superior performance. Additionally, a specialized deep-learning baseline model was developed using ResNet50 and EfficientNetB6 to classify driving-related images into distinct categories. The hybrid model integrates ML for analyzing tabular data and DL for image recognition, achieving a classification accuracy of 99.3% on the UAH-Drive dataset. Deep learning experiments further revealed that the Base Model outperformed other models, achieving accuracies of 99.32% on the UAH-Drive dataset and 99.87% on the SFD3 dataset. This research presents a robust hybrid ML-DL framework for detecting abnormal driving behaviors, addressing shortcomings of existing techniques in real-world conditions, and offering valuable insights for improving road safety and reducing accidents.