Driver’s eye blinking detection using novel color and texture segmentation algorithms

Abstract

In this paper we propose a system that measures eye blinking rate and eye closure duration. The system consists of skin-color segmentation, facial features segmentation, iris positioning and blink detection. The proposed skin-segmentation procedure is based on a neural network approximation of a RGB skin-color histogram. This method is robust and adaptive to any skin-color training set. The largest remaining skin-color region among skin-color segmentation results is further segmented into open/closed eyes, lips, nose, eyebrows, and the remaining facial regions using a novel texture segmentation algorithm. The segmentation algorithm classifies pixels according to the highest probability among the estimated facial feature class probability density functions (PDFs). The segmented eye regions are analyzed with the Circular Hough transform with the purpose of finding iris candidates. The finial iris position is selected according to the location of the maximum correlation value obtained from correlation with a predefined mask. The positions of irises and eye states are monitored through time to estimate eye blinking frequency and eye closure duration. The method of the driver drowsiness detection using these parameters is illustrated. The proposed system is tested on CCD and CMOS cameras under different environmental conditions and the experimental results show high system performance.