Beyond Breathalyzers: Towards Pre-Driving Sobriety Testing with a Driver Monitoring Camera

Simon Stent,  John Gideon,  Kimimasa Tamura,  Avinash Balachandran,  Guy Rosman
Toyota Research Institute
Presented at the 36th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), 2025

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Abstract

Field sobriety tests and breathalyzers are commonly used to prevent alcohol-impaired driving, but are expensive and time-consuming to administer. We propose a set of sobriety tests which, in contrast, can feasibly be automated and deployed to modern vehicles equipped with a driver monitoring camera. Our tests are inspired by research on the physiological effects of alcohol, with particular focus on eye movements and gaze behavior. We run an exploratory in-lab study with N=51 subjects (20 alcohol-impaired, 31 control), and train a variety of models to detect alcohol impairment. We find that, using only 10 seconds of observations of the driver, one of the four proposed tests performs comparably to existing non-breathalyzer field sobriety tests.

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Related work

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Citation

Please cite the paper as follows:

@inproceedings{stent2025iv, title = {Beyond Breathalyzers: Towards Pre-Driving Sobriety Testing with a Driver Monitoring Camera}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 36th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symoposium (IV)}, author = {Stent, Simon and Gideon, John and Tamura, Kimimasa and Balachandran, Avinash and Rosman, Guy}, year = {2025} }