Real-Time Drivers’ Drowsiness Detection: A Deep Learning Approach

A long road trip is fun for drivers. However, a long drive for days can be tedious for a driver to accommodate stringent deadlines to reach distant destinations. Such a scenario forces drivers to drive extra miles, utilizing extra hours daily without sufficient rest and breaks. Once a driver undergoes such a scenario, it occasionally triggers drowsiness during driving. Drowsiness in driving can be life-threatening to any individual and can affect other drivers’ safety; therefore, a real-time detection system is needed. To identify fatigued facial characteristics in drivers and trigger the alarm immediately, this research develops a real-time driver drowsiness detection system utilizing deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) and OpenCV. Our proposed and implemented model takes real-time facial images of a driver using a live camera and utilizes a Python-based library named OpenCV to examine the facial images for facial landmarks like sufficient eye openings and yawn-like mouth movements. The DCNNs framework then gathers the data and utilizes a pre-trained model to detect the drowsiness of a driver using facial landmarks. If the driver is identified as drowsy, the system issues a continuous alert in real time, embedded in the Smart Car technology. By potentially saving innocent lives on the roadways, the proposed technique offers a non-invasive, inexpensive, and cost-effective way to identify drowsiness. Our proposed and implemented DCNNs embedded drowsiness detection model successfully react with NTHU-DDD dataset and Yawn-Eye-Dataset with drowsiness detection classification accuracy of $\mathbf{9 9. 6 \%}$ and $\mathbf{9 7 \%}$ respectively.