Drowsiness monitoring based on driver and driving data fusion

This paper presents a non-intrusive approach for monitoring driver drowsiness, based on driver and driving data fusion. The Percentage of Eye Closure (PERCLOS) is used to estimate the driver´s state. The PERCLOS is computed on real time using a stereo vision-based system. The driving information used is the lateral position, the steering wheel angle and the heading error provided by the CAN bus. These three signals have been studied in the time and frequency domain. A multilayer perceptron neural network has been trained to fetch an optimal performance score. This system was installed in a naturalistic driving simulator. For evaluation purposes, several experiments were designed by psychologists and carried out with professional drivers. As ground truth, subjective experts´ manual annotation of the driver video sequences and driving signals was used. A detection rate of 70% using individual indicators was raised up to 94% with the combination of indicators. An explanation about these results and some conclusion are presented.