Real-Time Driver Drowsiness Detection Using Facial Analysis and Machine Learning Techniques

Drowsy driving poses a significant challenge to road safety worldwide, contributing to thousands of accidents and fatalities annually. Despite advancements in driver drowsiness detection (DDD) systems, many existing methods face limitations such as intrusiveness and delayed reaction times. This research addresses these gaps by leveraging facial analysis and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to develop a real-time, non-intrusive DDD system. A distinctive aspect of this research is its systematic assessment of various machine and deep learning algorithms across three pivotal public datasets, the NTHUDDD, YawDD, and UTA-RLDD, known for their widespread use in drowsiness detection studies. Our evaluation covered techniques including the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNNs), support vector machines (SVMs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and advanced computer vision (CV) models such as YOLOv5, YOLOv8, and Faster R-CNN. Notably, the KNNs classifier reported the highest accuracy of 98.89%, a precision of 99.27%, and an F1 score of 98.86% on the UTA-RLDD. Among the CV methods, YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 demonstrated exceptional performance, achieving 100% precision and recall with mAP@0.5 values of 99.5% on the UTA-RLDD. In contrast, Faster R-CNN showed an accuracy of 81.0% and a precision of 63.4% on the same dataset. These results demonstrate the potential of our system to significantly enhance road safety by providing proactive alerts in real time.