Continual Learning for Behavior-based Driver Identification

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of Continual Learning techniques for behavior-based driver identification, demonstrating their ability to adapt to changing behaviors with minimal accuracy loss and proposing new methods to improve performance.

Contribution

It introduces SmooER and SmooDER, novel methods leveraging temporal continuity, and shows CL approaches can effectively address real-world deployment challenges.

Findings

CL approaches like DER achieve 89% accuracy, close to static models.

SmooDER reduces accuracy loss to only 2%, outperforming DER.

The methods are feasible for deployment in resource-constrained environments.

Abstract

Behavior-based Driver Identification is an emerging technology that recognizes drivers based on their unique driving behaviors, offering important applications such as vehicle theft prevention and personalized driving experiences. However, most studies fail to account for the real-world challenges of deploying Deep Learning models within vehicles. These challenges include operating under limited computational resources, adapting to new drivers, and changes in driving behavior over time. The objective of this study is to evaluate if Continual Learning (CL) is well-suited to address these challenges, as it enables models to retain previously learned knowledge while continually adapting with minimal computational overhead and resource requirements. We tested several CL techniques across three scenarios of increasing complexity based on the well-known OCSLab dataset. This work provides an important step forward in scalable driver identification solutions, demonstrating that CL approaches, such as DER, can obtain strong performance, with only an 11% reduction in accuracy compared to the static scenario. Furthermore, to enhance the performance, we propose two new methods, SmooER and SmooDER, that leverage the temporal continuity of driver identity over time to enhance classification accuracy. Our novel method, SmooDER, achieves optimal results with only a 2% reduction compared to the 11\% of the DER approach. In conclusion, this study proves the feasibility of CL approaches to address the challenges of Driver Identification in dynamic environments, making them suitable for deployment on cloud infrastructure or directly within vehicles.