ICMFed: An Incremental and Cost-Efficient Mechanism of Federated Meta-Learning for Driver Distraction Detection

Driver distraction detection (3D) is essential in improving the efficiency and safety of transportation systems. Considering the requirements for user privacy and the phenomenon of data growth in real-world scenarios, existing methods are insufficient to address four emerging challenges, i.e., data accumulation, communication optimization, data heterogeneity, and device heterogeneity. This paper presents an incremental and cost-efficient mechanism based on federated meta-learning, called ICMFed, to support the tasks of 3D by addressing the four challenges. In particular, it designs a temporal factor associated with local training batches to stabilize the local model training, introduces gradient filters of each model layer to optimize the client–server interaction, implements a normalized weight vector to enhance the global model aggregation process, and supports rapid personalization for each user by adapting the learned global meta-model. According to the evaluation made based on the standard dataset, ICMFed can outperform three baselines in training two common models (i.e., DenseNet and EfficientNet) with average accuracy improved by about 141.42%, training time saved by about 54.80%, communication cost reduced by about 54.94%, and service quality improved by about 96.86%.