DMS(Driver Monitor System), short for driver monitoring system, is also a very important function of the popular ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) system, even standard.

The outbreak of DMS started 2020-picture 1-0 Pa net

Because, in recent years, due to the consideration of public travel safety, the European Union and China have issued laws and regulations. China has taken the lead in making mandatory requirements for the installation of DMS system for commercial vehicle models such as "two passengers and one danger", and the requirements for passenger vehicle carrying are also being formulated. However, E-NCAP released the 2025 roadmap, requiring that all new cars must be equipped with DMS starting from July 2022.

Subsequently, passenger car brands such as Volvo and Cadillac are also carrying related products. Behind these car companies is the entry of a large number of Tier 1 suppliers and the outbreak of DMS applications.

DMS begins to erupt
In 2006, the Lexus LS 460 was equipped with an active DMS for the first time. The camera is mounted on the top of the steering column cover with six built-in near-infrared LEDs. However, automobile companies have not been very interested in active DMS. On the one hand, it is the cost relationship, on the other hand, consumers are unwilling to pay for it.

Let's talk about what active DMS is. Passive DMS is not mentioned because it is outdated. Active DMS systems are typically based on cameras and near-infrared technology to detect driver status from eyelid closure, blinking, gaze direction, yawning, and head movement. Due to the development of autonomous driving, active DMS has become the focus.

DMS Outbreak Begins from 2020-Picture 2-0 Pa Net

In fact, in addition to Lexus, in April 2015, the Cadillac CT6, which was launched in the world at the new york Auto Show, became famous for carrying the DMS system of "Super Cruise. In March 2019, Volvo announced that by the early 2020 s, the next generation of expandable module architecture (SPA2) will be launched, when all new models based on SPA2 architecture will introduce DMS system.

Starting from 2018, with the mass production of L2 and the upcoming mass production of L3, the active DMS system will begin to expand. According to Zoss Auto Research, the number of active DMS systems installed in China in 2019 was 10,170 units, up 174 year-on-year. Installations in the first quarter of 2020 were 5,137 units, up 360 percent year-on-year.

Among them, the installed models include Great Wall VV6, Pentium T99, Chery Xingtu, Geely Xingyue, Xiaopeng G3, etc. They are mainly top-fitting and sub-top-fitting, with a price range of 15~200000 yuan, while Xiaopeng G3 can push DMS function through OTA. It is reported that other companies plan to push in the first half of this year.

Of course, compared with the annual sales of 20 million cars in the car market, this amount is really insignificant. However, as light shines into a safe fissure, the demonstration effect is strong.

DMS Outbreak Begins 2020-Picture 3-0 Pa Net

In the long run, since DMS technology belongs to the perception link in intelligent driving (perception, decision-making and control), in the L3 state, when the driving scenario exceeds the capability of the system, the driving power cannot be safely returned from the machine to the human driver? How to ensure that the human has the ability to take over? This requires the system to understand the current state of the human driver, and DMS becomes a necessity.

For a market with a future output value of 100 billion yuan, Jingwei Vision Wang Bo said, "The safety market itself is very large. The World Health Organization report shows that more than 130 million people die in road accidents worldwide each year, with more than 250000 deaths in China. According to an average loss of 1.2 million yuan per accident, the country alone is a loss of more than 300 billion yuan. Do a good job of safety can recover the loss of these accidents."

Difficulties in the Application of DMS
At present, most Tier1 have launched DMS complete solutions, including Valeo, Bosch, Continental, Denso, Hyundai Mobis, Visteon, Vining, etc. DMS products of Hikvision, Shang Tang Technology, Baidu, Dahua and other companies in Chinese enterprises have also begun to land on various brand models.

However, the commercial mass production of DMS system still faces many difficulties that are difficult to solve, the most important of which are four points:

DMS Outbreak, Starting from 2020-Picture 4-0 Pa Net

1. The biggest technical difficulty of vision-based DMS is the performance in the face of strong light or weak light. The light is too strong and the image appears all white. The light is so weak that the image appears to be all black. In the face of this situation, no matter how strong the algorithm is, it is useless. For another example, when the sun shines on the face from the side window, it will produce the phenomenon of yin and yang, and there will be insufficient light when the car enters the tunnel or drives at night.

2.DMS runs on the vehicle computing platform and faces the challenge of insufficient computing power. Because most of the existing mainstream vehicle computing platforms only have low-end ARM CPU/GPU, its computing power is not even as good as that of mobile phone chips two years ago. It is difficult to run algorithms such as face detection, key point detection, face recognition, eye tracking, gesture recognition and so on on such a platform. In other words, there is a lack of automotive-level chips that can support deep learning.

Why do you say that? The use of deep learning technology can better realize artificial intelligence. The convolutional neural network in deep learning technology is used in the DMS system to identify and express features more accurately. Ordinary neural networks generally have only 3-4 layers due to the high training cost, while convolutional neural networks can reach 8-10 layers due to the use of special training methods and some small tricks. In other words, deep neural networks can capture deep connections in the data, which can lead to more accurate models.

DMS Outbreak Begins 2020-Picture 5-0 Pa Net

3. Data collection and labeling face great challenges. Computer vision algorithms (such as deep learning-based algorithms) have high requirements for image quality, and the performance of the same algorithm under different cameras may vary greatly. In addition, the signal-to-noise ratio, contrast, image occlusion and jitter, different weather and time period of light differences lead to different image brightness.

4. The visual DMS algorithm faces the challenge of the driver's changeable state. Car drivers have different genders, ages, and races. They may wear hats, masks, and glasses (including sunglasses). During driving, their heads will appear in various postures, which can be described as "72 changes". These complex situations will also pose a great challenge to the algorithm.

In addition, how to quantify and define the fatigue state and the drowsiness state is also a bottleneck faced by DMS. How to measure fatigue? There is a relationship between fatigue and body temperature, skin resistance, eye movement, respiratory rate, heart rate and brain activity. The most effective method is to measure pulse and heart rate variability HRV, but this technology is not mature enough.

These factors have hindered the entry of many companies. At present, there are still few companies in China that can have the capacity of DMS and even the entire ADAS system front-mounted mass production. Of course, with the continuous advancement of technology in the industry, these shortcomings are quickly eliminated.

At present, the application of DMS only stays in the early warning stage, but once combined with ADAS/AD system, it can also realize personalized body control and other functions. For example, through the recognition of face, gender and expression, identity authentication, and richer human-vehicle interaction, and so on. Moreover, with the large-scale application of L2/L3, the future DMS system will also evolve into a cockpit monitoring system.

DMS Outbreak, Starting from 2020-Picture 6-0 Pa Net

Of course, these rich functions cannot be completed by Tier1 suppliers alone in a short period of time, so DMS systems have to rely on the cooperation of Tier1 algorithm manufacturers, such as EyeSight, Smart Eye, FotoNation, Seeing Machine and other software algorithm companies. Therefore, it is really not empty talk that algorithms determine the future.

DMS in the field of commercial vehicles
In addition to passenger cars, the penetration rate of ADAS technology represented by DMS in the freight field has also increased rapidly in recent years, and is expected to grow further in the next few years with the continuous landing of relevant regulations and standards, reaching a market size of 10 billion. Among them, the application of DMS can be described as a heavy part.

According to the statistics of the White Paper on Smart Safety in China's Road Freight Industry, by 2019, China's road freight volume will exceed 41.6 billion tons, the cargo turnover will be close to 8 trillion ton kilometers, and the number of trucks will exceed 13 million, making it the largest market in the world. However, as of 2019, the number of road freight accidents in my country was 3.7 per million kilometers, while the number of road freight accidents in the United States had dropped to about 0.1 per million kilometers as early as 2014.

In-depth analysis shows that 37% of these accidents are caused by driver factors, of which 80% are caused by driver's aggressive driving behavior and 15% are caused by driver's fatigue driving. 4% of accidents are caused by drivers' distraction, such as making phone calls, watching mobile phones, smoking, etc. 1% of accidents are caused by drivers' dangerous driving behaviors.

DMS Outbreak, Starting from 2020-Picture 7-0 Pa Net

Therefore, the security effect of mandatory installation of DMS system will also be very obvious. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, by the end of March this year in Sichuan Province, the on-board active safety intelligent prevention and control equipment of 31300 key operating vehicles of "two passengers and one danger" in 21 cities (prefectures) of Sichuan Province have all realized the automatic identification and real-time reminder of unsafe behaviors of drivers.

And such a large security market application scale, in recent years has attracted a large number of players to enter, such as Foritec, intelligent driving technology, clear intelligence technology, extreme eye intelligence, MINIEYE and so on. In addition, commercial vehicle pneumatic system company Ruili Group and domestic commercial vehicle leading enterprise Weichai Group have also chosen to invest in related enterprises, into the commercial vehicle ADAS field.

However, at present, the technology accumulation of local enterprises is mostly in the field of perception and early warning, and there is still a certain gap between the implementation level and foreign parts giants. Therefore, with the gradual evolution of ADAS function from simply providing early warning function to braking function, these enterprises with weak execution technology are forced to evolve their own capabilities.

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