Driver Drowsiness Monitoring using Convolutional Neural Networks

The advancement in computer vision has assisted drivers in the form of automatic self-driving cars etc. The misadventure are caused by driver's fatigue and drowsiness about 20%. It poses a serious problem for which several approaches were proposed. However, they are not suitable for real-time processing. The major challenges faced by these methods are robustness to handle variation in human face and lightning conditions. We aim to implement an intelligent processing system that can reduce road accidents drastically. This approach enables us to identify driver's face characteristics like eye closure percentage, eye-mouth aspect ratios, blink rate, yawning, head movement, etc. In this system, the driver is continuously monitored by using a webcam. The driver's face and the eye are detected using haar cascade classifiers. Eye images are extracted and fed to Custom designed Convolutional Neural Network for classifying whether both left and right eye are closed. Based on the classification, the eye closure score is calculated. If the driver is found to be drowsy, an alarm will be triggered.