Recognition of a Driver's Gaze for Vehicle Headlamp Control

In this paper, we propose a novel method for gaze recognition of a driver coping with rotation of a driver's face. Frontal face images and left half profile images were separately trained using the Viola-Jones (V-J) algorithm to produce classifiers that can detect faces. The right half profile can be detected by mirroring the entire image when neither a frontal face nor a left half profile was detected. As an initial step, this method was used to simultaneously detect the driver's face. Then, we applied a regressional version of linear discriminant analysis (LDAr) to the detected facial region to extract important features for classification. Finally, these features were used to classify the driver's gaze in seven directions. In the feature extraction step, LDAr tries to find features that maximize the ratio of interdistances among samples with large differences in the target value to those with small differences in the target value. Therefore, the resultant features are more fitted to regression problems than conventional feature extraction methods. In addition to LDAr, in this paper, a 2-D extension of LDAr is also developed and used as a feature extraction method for gaze recognition. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a good gaze recognition rate under various rotation angles of a driver's head, resulting in a reliable headlamp control performance.