Blink Rate Monitoring for a Driver Awareness System

We describe a working prototype computer vision system for measuring the blink rate of car drivers. It combines an intelligent face recognition system with feature tracking, and statistical image analysis methods to locate and track the head position of a driver in a car, and extract specific measurements from the eyes. This is done using standard hardware (a Sun IPC workstation and frame grabber) without the use of image processing or other specialised hardware. The information obtained is used to give an indication of driver alertness which forms one of the inputs to a complete driver monitoring system.

[1]  T. Bachmann.  Identification of spatially quantised tachistoscopic images of faces: How many pixels does it take to carry identity? , 1991 .

[2]  Peter W. Hallinan.  Recognizing human eyes , 1991, Optics & Photonics.

[3]  R J Murray.  Stay awake, stay alive. , 1966, The Journal of the Michigan State Dental Association.

[4]  Ian Craw,et al.  Finding Face Features , 1992, ECCV.

[5]  Alan L. Yuille,et al.  Feature extraction from faces using deformable templates , 2004, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[6]  Ian Craw,et al.  Finding Image Features Using Deformable Templates And Detailed Prior Statistical Knowledge , 1991 .

[7]  Hans P. Moravec.  Towards Automatic Visual Obstacle Avoidance , 1977, IJCAI.

[8]  David A. Castelow,et al.  A Monocular Ground Plane Estimation System , 1991, BMVC.

[9]  J. B. Waite,et al.  An application of active contour models to head boundary location , 1990, BMVC.

[10]  Mark S. Nixon,et al.  Eye Spacing Measurement for Facial Recognition , 1985, Optics & Photonics.

[11]  Gösta H. Granlund,et al.  Image Sequence Analysis , 1993, DAGM-Symposium.

[12]  E.E. Pissaloux,et al.  Image Processing , 1994, Proceedings. Second Euromicro Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Processing.

[13]  D. Dinges,et al.  Catastrophes, sleep, and public policy: consensus report. , 1988, Sleep.

[14]  Ian Craw,et al.  A knowledge based system for measuring faces , 1990, BMVC.

[15]  Tieniu Tan,et al.  Structure from Constrained Motion Using Point Correspondences , 1991 .

[16]  Christopher J. Taylor,et al.  An Intelligent Segmentation System for Lateral Skull X-Ray Images , 1989, Alvey Vision Conference.

[17]  Chris Harris,et al.  RAPID - a video rate object tracker , 1990, BMVC.

[18]  Christopher J. Taylor,et al.  Shape verification using belief updating , 1990, BMVC.

[19]  Ian Craw,et al.  Finding Image Features Using Deformable Templates and Detailed Prior Statistical Knowledge , 1991, BMVC.