Active facial tracking for fatigue detection

The vision-based driver fatigue detection is one of the most prospective commercial applications of facial expression recognition technology. The facial feature tracking is the primary technique issue in it. Current facial tracking technology faces three challenges: (1) detection failure of some or all of features due to a variety of lighting conditions and head motions; (2) multiple and non-rigid object tracking; and (3) features occlusion when the head is in oblique angles. In this paper, we propose a new active approach. First, the active IR sensor is used to robustly detect pupils under variable lighting conditions. The detected pupils are then used to predict the head motion. Furthermore, face movement is assumed to be locally smooth so that a facial feature can be tracked with a Kalman filter. The simultaneous use of the pupil constraint and the Kalman filtering greatly increases the prediction accuracy for each feature position. Feature detection is accomplished in the Gabor space with respect to the vicinity of predicted location. Local graphs consisting of identified features are extracted and used to capture the spatial relationship among detected features. Finally, a graph-based reliability propagation is proposed to tackle the occlusion problem and verify the tracking results. The experimental results show validity of our active approach to real-life facial tracking under variable lighting conditions, head orientations, and facial expressions.