# Spatial-Temporal Perception with Causal Inference for Naturalistic Driving Action Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04078 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04078/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04503/) (2017)
- [Reti-Diff: Illumination Degradation Image Restoration with Retinex-based Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11638/) (2023)
- [TransDARC: Transformer-based Driver Activity Recognition with Latent Space Feature Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00927/) (2022)
- [Synthetic Distracted Driving (SynDD2) dataset for analyzing distracted behaviors and various gaze zones of a driver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08096/) (2022)
- [A Comparative Analysis of Decision-Level Fusion for Multimodal Driver Behaviour Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04734/) (2022)
- [ASY-VRNet: Waterway Panoptic Driving Perception Model based on Asymmetric Fair Fusion of Vision and 4D mmWave Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10287/) (2023)
- [Review on Action Recognition for Accident Detection in Smart City Transportation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09588/) (2022)
- [Multi-modality action recognition based on dual feature shift in vehicle cabin monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14838/) (2024)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning for Detecting Anomalous Driving Behaviours from Multimodal Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04021/) (2021)
- [Real-Time Driver Monitoring Systems through Modality and View Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09441/) (2022)
- [M2DAR: Multi-View Multi-Scale Driver Action Recognition with Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08877/) (2023)
- [DRIVE: Dependable Robust Interpretable Visionary Ensemble Framework in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10330/) (2024)
- [SkateboardAI: The Coolest Video Action Recognition for Skateboarding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11467/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Naturalistic driving action recognition is essential for vehicle cabin monitoring systems. However, the complexity of real-world backgrounds presents significant challenges for this task, and previous approaches have struggled with practical implementation due to their limited ability to observe subtle behavioral differences and effectively learn inter-frame features from video. In this paper, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Perception (STP) architecture that emphasizes both temporal information and spatial relationships between key objects, incorporating a causal decoder to perform behavior recognition and temporal action localization. Without requiring multimodal input, STP directly extracts temporal and spatial distance features from RGB video clips. Subsequently, these dual features are jointly encoded by maximizing the expected likelihood across all possible permutations of the factorization order. By integrating temporal and spatial features at different scales, STP can perceive subtle behavioral changes in challenging scenarios. Additionally, we introduce a causal-aware module to explore relationships between video frame features, significantly enhancing detection efficiency and performance. We validate the effectiveness of our approach using two publicly available driver distraction detection benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance.