A real-time drowsiness and fatigue recognition using support vector machine

Abstract

A drowsiness and fatigue problems among the drivers are the main factor that contributes to road accidents. These problems are vital to be resolved as they could contribute to damage of road facilities, vehicles and most importantly the loss of lives. In avoiding these matters, a proper mechanism is needed to alert the driver to stay awake throughout the driving journey. Thus, this study proposed a real-time prototype for recognizing the drowsiness and fatigue face expression of the driver. The methodology of this study involves facial features detection using Viola-Jones algorithm to detect the exact position of both left and right eyes and mouth. Next, based on the detected eyes and mouth beforehand, the segmentation processes performed on both eyes and mouth using Sobel edge detection to obtain facial regions. The feature extraction phase is conducted using shape-based feature to obtain the extraction values. Support vector machine (SVM) classifier is deployed for the recognition task. A total of 100 images are used during the testing stages. This study achieved a competetive result of 90.00% of accuracy. Yet, hybridization or integration of more image processing techniques will be performed in the future to improve the current accuracy obtained.