The Key Technology Research, Vision-based Driver Fatigue Monitoring

The increasing number of traffic accidents due to a driver's fatigue has become aserious problem for the society. With the background, developing a system for monitoringthe driver's level of vigilance and alerting the driver when he fatigues is essential. In thisthesis, a software system is developed for detecting the driver's fatigue and some keytechnologies are presented.First of all, a new eye model is proposed in our system. According to the model, theheight of upper eyelid is detected to show the eyes' status.Secondly, the eyes' locations are found and some features of eyes are detected. Inorder to get the locations of the eyes, two methods are implemented, Morphologicaltransformation algorithm and Grayness integral projection algorithm. The precision andtime cost for the two methods are compared and the latter is better for our system. Activecontour model, which is also named Snake algorithm, is introduced to detect the uppereyelid. Because of the special grads of the eye, an ameliorated snake algorithm is proposed.The new algorithm consists two phases. The first phase utilizes the overall information ofthe edge of the eye to be detected. The second phase utilizes the grads of the eye image.The experimental results show that the new method could detect the upper eyelideffectively.Finally, the three fatigue parameters are picked up, which are PERCLOS, Eye closuretime and Eye blink frequency. ID3 algorithm is introduced to develop a decision tree whichcan use the three parameters to recognize the driver's fatigue.A software system based on the above technologies is implemented and the system candetect the driver's eyes and recognize his fatigue in real time. From the running effect ofthis system, the efficiency of this system is very high in the laboratory environment.