Driver Drowsiness Detection in Facial Images

Extracting effective features of fatigue in images and videos is an open problem. This paper introduces a face image descriptor that can be used for discriminating driver fatigue in static frames. In this method, first, each facial image in the sequence is represented by a pyramid whose levels are divided into non-overlapping blocks of the same size, and hybrid image descriptor are employed to extract features in all blocks. Then the obtained descriptor is filtered out using feature selection. Finally, non-linear SVM is applied to predict the drowsiness state of the subject in the image. The proposed method was tested on the public dataset NTH Drowsy Driver Detection (NTHUDDD). This dataset includes a wide range of human subjects of different genders, poses, and illuminations in real-life fatigue conditions. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. These results show that the proposed hand-crafted feature compare favorably with several approaches based on the use of deep Convolutional Neural Nets.