Driver drowsiness detection system under infrared illumination for an intelligent vehicle

Statistics on traffic accidents reveal that human error is the main cause of deaths and injuries on roads worldwide every day. In order to reduce the amount of such fatalities, a module for an advanced driver assistance system, which caters for automatic driver drowsiness detection and also driver distraction, is presented. Artificial intelligence algorithms are used to process the visual information in order to locate, track and analyse both the driver´s face and eyes to compute the drowsiness and distraction indexes. This real-time system works during nocturnal conditions as a result of a near-infrared lighting system. Finally, examples of different driver images taken in a real vehicle at nighttime are shown to validate the proposed algorithms.