Driver monitoring with a single high-speed camera and IR illumination

The driver´s diminished attention or fatigue are a major cause of fatal road accidents. Therefore techniques that can assess the fatigue and attention levels of the driver must be developed. These systems may see future introduction in vehicles only if they are non-intrusive and completely transparent to the driver. To address these challenges we propose a measurement system that uses a single high-speed camera and IR illumination to measure the eyelid opening and the orientation of the driver´s head and gaze. These measurements are vital for any system that attempts to assess the driver´s fatigue and attention levels. Currently, we require the driver to wear a small headband with markers and to perform a short calibration for gaze estimation. We are working actively towards removing these limitations. The results that we have obtained so far are encouraging and in accordance with our expectations. The system is accurate (gaze accuracy varies from 1° when the head rotation angles are smaller than 15° to 3° for head angles from roughly 15° to roughly 45°), and very robust, and performs reliably even with most of the people wearing glasses. To our knowledge, we here present the only system that can reliably measure eyelid opening, and head and gaze orientations with a single camera at high speed (120Hz).