Mental State and Behavior Inference using Mirror Neuron System Architecture for Traffic/Driver Monitoring

Traffic psychology presents interesting avenues towards the development of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Analysis of driver state, emotion and behavior are important components of traffic psychology. While being comprehensive in terms of theoretical frameworks, these analyses lack neurobiological computational models for evaluation. In this paper, we develop computational models for driver state and behavior, also known as Mental State Inference (MSI) based on the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) architecture. The integrated system combines neurobiological models with computer vision techniques for traffic monitoring from surveillance video leading to MSI and event recognition. Evaluation of the system is carried out in terms of actual, psychophysical as well as neurobiological criteria on both simulated and real data. Results demonstrate event and mental state recognition convergence within 0.5 normalized time units for the designed event models on synthetic and real data. The model is also robust to perturbations and is aligned to behavior expected at the psychophysical level.