Driver fatigue detection method based on eye states with pupil and iris segmentation

Abstract

Fatigue driving has become one of the most common causes for traffic accidents. In this article, we proposed an effective fatigue detection method based on eye status with pupil and iris segmentation. The segmented feature map can guide the detection to focus on pupil and iris. A streamlined network, consisting of a segmentation network and a decision network, is designed, which greatly improves the accuracy and generalization of eye openness estimation. Specifically, the segmentation network that uses light U-Net structure performs a pixel-level classification on the eye images, which can accurately extract pupil and iris features from the video's images. Then, the extracted feature map is used to guide the decision network to estimate eye openness. Finally, the detection method is test by the National Tsing Hua University Drowsy Driver Detection (NTHU-DDD) Video Dataset and the precision of fatigue detection achieves 96.72%. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately detect the driver fatigue in-time and possesses superior accuracy over the state-of-the-art techniques.