Development of a drowsiness detection system using retinex theory and edge information

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a development method for a drowsiness detection system using retinex theory and edge information for vehicle safety. Detection of a drowsy state of a driver is very important because the drowsiness of driver is often the main cause of many car accidents. After acquiring an image of the entire face, we executed the pre-process step using the retinex theory. We then applied a technique for the detection of the white pixels using edge information. Experimental results showed that the proposed method improved the accuracy of detecting drowsiness to nearly 98%, and can be used to prevent a car accident caused by the driver's drowsiness.