Real-Time Driver Drowsiness Detection System Using Eye Aspect Ratio and Eye Closure Ratio

Every year many people lose their lives due to fatal road accidents around the world and drowsy driving is one of the primary causes of road accidents and death. Fatigue and micro sleep at the driving controls are often the root cause of serious accidents. However, initial signs of fatigue can be detected before a critical situation arises and therefore, detection of driver’s fatigue and its indication is ongoing research topic. Most of the traditional methods to detect drowsiness are based on behavioural aspects while some are intrusive and may distract drivers, while some require expensive sensors. Therefore, in this paper, a light-weight, real time driver’s drowsiness detection system is developed and implemented on Android application. The system records the videos and detects driver’s face in every frame by employing image processing techniques. The system is capable of detecting facial landmarks, computes Eye Aspect Ratio (EAR) and Eye Closure Ratio (ECR) to detect driver’s drowsiness based on adaptive thresholding. Machine learning algorithms have been employed to test the efficacy of the proposed approach. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed model is able to achieve accuracy of 84% using random forest classifier.