Detection of driver’s hazardous situation using coarse far-infrared image

In this paper we propose a simple method to detect driverpsilas hazardous situation using coarse (8 by 6) far-infrared image. We utilized horizontal and vertical peripheral accumulation distribution of the original coarse thermal image. We could do without thresholding procedure using maximum position of these two distributions as face/head position. The tracking of face/head position is used to determine the driverpsilas hazardous situation. The most typical case is the face/head position goes out of the image. The other cases are a jerky motion and a no motion for a long time. The proposed method was applied to three scenes (two for the driver and one for the child in the front seat) of actual driving and show the usefulness of the proposed method in detecting driverpsilas hazardous situation.