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

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.

Supplementary Video

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} }