A drowsiness detection method using distance and gradient vectors

This paper presents a drowsiness detection for drivers. The drowsiness is detected by monitoring the eye state (open or close). Firstly, human face detection is performed using the Haar cascade method. Within the facial region, we can approximately determine the eye regions, further restricting the region of interest (ROI). We then locate a dark circular object using two vectors: one is distance vectors and the other gradient vectors. The cross-correlation between these two vectors should be maximized at the center of a dark circle. Experimental results show that the proposed method works well in both bright and dark conditions. The computation speed of the proposed method is fast enough to perform at a video rate.