%0 Journal Article
%T A Driver Face Monitoring System for Fatigue and Distraction Detection
%A Mohamad-Hoseyn Sigari
%A Mahmood Fathy
%A Mohsen Soryani
%J International Journal of Vehicular Technology
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/263983
%X Driver face monitoring system is a real-time system that can detect driver fatigue and distraction using machine vision approaches. In this paper, a new approach is introduced for driver hypovigilance (fatigue and distraction) detection based on the symptoms related to face and eye regions. In this method, face template matching and horizontal projection of top-half segment of face image are used to extract hypovigilance symptoms from face and eye, respectively. Head rotation is a symptom to detect distraction that is extracted from face region. The extracted symptoms from eye region are (1) percentage of eye closure, (2) eyelid distance changes with respect to the normal eyelid distance, and (3) eye closure rate. The first and second symptoms related to eye region are used for fatigue detection; the last one is used for distraction detection. In the proposed system, a fuzzy expert system combines the symptoms to estimate level of driver hypo-vigilance. There are three main contributions in the introduced method: (1) simple and efficient head rotation detection based on face template matching, (2) adaptive symptom extraction from eye region without explicit eye detection, and (3) normalizing and personalizing the extracted symptoms using a short training phase. These three contributions lead to develop an adaptive driver eye/face monitoring. Experiments show that the proposed system is relatively efficient for estimating the driver fatigue and distraction. 1. Introduction Improvement of public safety and the reduction of accidents are of the important goals of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). One of the most important factors in accidents, especially on rural roads, is the driver fatigue and monotony. Fatigue reduces driver perceptions and decision making capability to control the vehicle. Researches show that usually the driver is fatigued after 1 hour of driving. In the afternoon early hours, after eating lunch and at midnight, driver fatigue and drowsiness is much more than other times. In addition, drinking alcohol, drug addiction, and using hypnotic medicines can lead to loss of consciousness [1, 2]. In different countries, different statistics were reported about accidents that happened due to driver fatigue and distraction. Generally, the main reason of about 20% of the crashes and 30% of fatal crashes is the driver drowsiness and lack of concentration. In single-vehicle crashes (accidents in which only one vehicle is damaged) or crashes involving heavy vehicles, up to 50% of accidents are related to driver hypovigilance [1, 3¨C5].
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijvt/2013/263983/