Eyes too narrow: Xiaomi SU7 constantly woke a Chinese man from sleeping at the wheel by mistake

It seems that Chinese manufacturers are supposed to design cars with the peculiarities of their citizens in mind. But something went wrong with the Xiaomi SU7 in this regard.

Mr. Li, a resident of Zhejiang province, is constantly faced with warnings about driver fatigue from automatic system of the car. He receives messages by voice and on the screen: «Please concentrate on driving and pay attention to safety». I think it’s the driver’s eye view.

In the video on the Chinese social network, Li tries to open his eyes as wide as possible to stop the sound of the reminder. In the comments, many users say that they have experienced a similar situation on several other local car brands, such as Weilai and Deep Blue.

Car blogger DerekTLM wrote that he has extremely narrow eyes and is awake, but the system mistakenly identified him as sleeping and deducted his driving points. Other specialized Chinese bloggers have also encountered the problem.

Xiaomi Auto’s tech support team explains that the steering wheel camera detects fatigue by recording behaviors such as eye closure and yawning. Support says that the camera can be customized or disabled, but emphasizes that this will reduce safety.

Experts from the School of Artificial Intelligence at Henan University say that the onboard DMS (driver monitoring system) makes decisions mainly through visual perception, supplemented by other information. Cameras are installed on the steering wheel, front pillar, or rearview mirror to monitor the driver’s condition. Infrared cameras can effectively monitor the driver at night or even through sunglasses. The method is to capture and evaluate facial features, quantify the degree of eye opening and closing, mouth opening and closing, and assess driver fatigue and inattention while driving.

Why? Xiaomi SU7 system unfriendly to people with narrow eyes? Currently, most manufacturers use only one visual template to determine the state of fatigue. The algorithm is rather crude and lacks optimizations, in particular for Asian appearance. It is ironic that Chinese systems mainly use the American PERCLOS P80 standard — eyelids covering more than 80% of the pupil are considered closed eyes. But this obviously doesn’t work in China, where the error rate is as high as 60%.

Source: Sohu