Driver Gaze Region Estimation without Use of Eye Movement

Automated estimation of the allocation of a driver's visual attention could be a critical component of future advanced driver assistance systems. In theory, vision-based tracking of the eye can provide a good estimate of gaze location. But in practice, eye tracking from video is challenging because of sunglasses, eyeglass reflections, lighting conditions, occlusions, motion blur, and other factors. Estimation of head pose, on the other hand, is robust to many of these effects but can't provide as fine-grained of a resolution in localizing the gaze. For the purpose of keeping the driver safe, it's sufficient to partition gaze into regions. In this effort, a proposed system extracts facial features and classifies their spatial configuration into six regions in real time. The proposed method achieves an average accuracy of 91.4 percent at an average decision rate of 11 Hz on a dataset of 50 drivers from an on-road study.