Intelligent video-based drowsy driver detection system under various illuminations and embedded software implementation

An intelligent video-based drowsy driver detection system, which is unaffected by various illuminations, is developed in this study. Even if a driver wears glasses, the proposed system detects the drowsy conditions effectively. By a near-infrared-ray (NIR) camera, the proposed system is divided into two cascaded computational procedures: the driver eyes detection and the drowsy driver detection. The average open/closed eyes detection rates without/with glasses are 94% and 78%, respectively, and the accuracy of the drowsy status detection is up to 91%. By implementing on the FPGA-based embedded platform, the processing speed with the 640×480 format video is up to 16 frames per second (fps) after software optimizations.