1. A method for detecting electronic device use by a driver of a vehicle, the method comprising: acquiring a monochrome NIR image including a vehicle from an associated image capture device positioned to view oncoming traffic; locating a region of the vehicle in the monochrome NIR image; processing pixels of the located region of the monochrome NIR image for computing a feature vector describing a windshield region of the vehicle; applying the feature vector to a classifier for classifying the monochrome NIR image into respective classes including at least classes for candidate electronic device use and candidate electronic device non-use; and, outputting the classification; wherein processing the image includes generating a global descriptor describing the entire image using a process selected from a group consisting of: a Successive Mean Quantization Transform (SMQT); a Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT); a Histogram of Gradients (HOG); a Bag-of-Visual-Words Representation; a Fisher Vector(FV) Representation: and, a combination of the above; wherein the SMQT process includes determining a feature vector for each pixel in the image by analyzing adjacent pixels in the region of the pixel, wherein for each pixel, the pixel is designated as a center pixel in a region of adjacent pixels, an average value for the pixels in the region is determined, the average value is set as a threshold value, the value of each pixel in the region is compared to the threshold, each pixel in the region is assigned a binary value based on the comparison, and a binary number is generated for the region.