Real-Time Machine Learning-Based Driver Drowsiness Detection Using Visual Features

Drowsiness-related car accidents continue to have a significant effect on road safety. Many of these accidents can be eliminated by alerting the drivers once they start feeling drowsy. This work presents a non-invasive system for real-time driver drowsiness detection using visual features. These features are extracted from videos obtained from a camera installed on the dashboard. The proposed system uses facial landmarks and face mesh detectors to locate the regions of interest where mouth aspect ratio, eye aspect ratio, and head pose features are extracted and fed to three different classifiers: random forest, sequential neural network, and linear support vector machine classifiers. Evaluations of the proposed system over the National Tsing Hua University driver drowsiness detection dataset showed that it can successfully detect and alarm drowsy drivers with an accuracy up to 99%.