Vision-based drowsiness detector for real driving conditions

This paper presents a non-intrusive approach for drowsiness detection, based on computer vision. It is installed in a car and it is able to work under real operation conditions. An IR camera is placed in front of the driver, in the dashboard, in order to detect his face and obtain drowsiness clues from their eyes closure. It works in a robust and automatic way, without prior calibration. The presented system is composed of 3 stages. The first one is preprocessing, which includes face and eye detection and normalization. The second stage performs pupil position detection and characterization, combining it with an adaptive lighting filtering to make the system capable of dealing with outdoor illumination conditions. The final stage computes PERCLOS from eyes closure information. In order to evaluate this system, an outdoor database was generated, consisting of several experiments carried out during more than 25 driving hours. A study about the performance of this proposal, showing results from this testbench, is presented.