Detecting the eye and its openness with Gabor filters

Drivers fatigue is the major cause of traffic accidents all over the world. Advanced image processing technology processing the stream obtained from infrared cameras is able to supervise blinking rate and at the same time drowsiness of the vehicle driver. Such a system may warn not only the tired person, but also the passengers, whom the driver takes responsibility for. In this article we present a method of determining the openness of the eye from still images. The method proposed is based on the eye detection presented in our previous work [1]. The eye is detected by using some fine-tuned Gabor filters, specially developed for this purpose. In order to speed up eye detection, the well-known Viola-Jones [2] face detection method is used, implementing self-trained classifier obtaining lower false positive detection rate [3]. The created final classifier is able to detect more pixels of the open eye and compares it to the eyelid marked with very few pixels, meaning a closed eye.