Affordable visual driver monitoring system for fatigue and monotony

In this contribution we present a visual driver surveillance system to monitor the driver's head motion as well as the eye blink patterns. Based on these measured features the system is able to detect symptoms of fatigue and monotony. The main advantages of the presented system in contrast to existing ones is the usage of standard equipment to achieve a good cost-performance ratio, fast computation time, the possibility of measurements in darkness and the consideration of monotony. The image analysis is realized in a coarse-to-fine architecture. At first the driver's face is detected which is based on a boosted cascade of Haar wavelets. Then the eyes are searched in the face and occurring eye blinks measured by analyzing the optical flow of the eyes' region. The performance of the system was tested successfully under ideal and natural conditions.