Eye Aspect Ratio for Real-Time Drowsiness Detection to Improve Driver Safety

Abstract

Drowsiness is a major risk factor for road safety, contributing to serious injury, death, and economic loss on the road. Driving performance decreases because of increased drowsiness. In several different applications, such as facial movement analysis and driver safety, blink detection is an essential requirement that is used. The extremely rapid blink rate, on the other hand, makes automatic blink detection an extremely challenging task. This research paper presents a technique for identifying eye blinks in a video series recorded by a car dashboard camera in real time. The suggested technique determines the facial landmark positions for each video frame and then extracts the vertical distance between the eyelids from the facial landmark positions. The algorithm that has been proposed estimates the facial landmark positions, extracts a single scalar quantity by making use of Eye Aspect Ratio (EAR), and identifies the eye closeness in each frame. In the end, blinks are recognized by employing the modified EAR threshold value in conjunction with a pattern of EAR values in a relatively short period of time. Experimental evidence indicates that the greater the EAR threshold, the worse the AUC’s accuracy and performance. Further, 0.18 was determined to be the optimum EAR threshold in our research.