Real-time nonintrusive monitoring and detection of eye blinking in view of accident prevention due to drowsiness

Abstract

Driver fatigue is the major cause of accidents in the world. Detecting the drowsiness of the driver is the surest ways of measuring the driver fatigue. The purpose of this paper is to develop a drowsiness detection system. This system works by analyzing the eye movement of the driver and alerting the driver by activating the buzzer when he/she is drowsy. The system so implemented is a nonintrusive real-time monitoring system for eye detection. During monitoring, the system is able to decide whether the eyes were opened or closed. When the eyes were detected closed for too long, a signal was issued to warn the driver. In addition, the system also have an option for making vibration when drowsiness was detected. The aim is on improving the safety of the driver without being obtrusive. Visual cues were obtained through eye blink rate by using a camera, which typically characterize the level of alertness of a person. These were extracted in real-time and systematically joined to check the fatigue level of the driver. The system can monitor the driver's eyes to detect short periods of sleep lasting 3 to 4 seconds. The system implemented in this approach runs at 8–15 frames per second. The application was implemented using Open CV in Raspberry Pi environment with a single camera view. This system was used to detect the drowsiness of the driver and thereby reducing the road accidents.