2004 IEEE lntemational Conference on Systems, Man and Cybemetics zyxw Affordable Visual ]DriverMonitoring System for Fatigue and Monotony* zy Thomas Brandt, Ralf Stemmer University of Paderbom Andry Rakotonirainy Queensland University of Technology GET Lab CAMS-Q Paderbom, Germany Brisbane, Australia {brandt, stemmer} @get.upb.de axakotonirainy @qut.edu.au Abstract zyxwvutsrqp - zyxwvu In this contribution we present a visual driver surveillance system to monitor the driver’s head morion as well as the eye blink patterns. Based zyxwvutsrqp on these measun?d fea- tures the system is able to detect symptoms of farigire and monotony. The main advantages of the presented system in coiitrast to existing ones is the usage of standard equipment to achieve a good cost-performance ratio, fast compiitarion time, the possibility zyxwvutsr of measurements in darkness and the consideration of monotony. rite image analysis is realized in a coarse-to-finearchitecture. Atfrsr the driver’s face is de- tected which is based on a boosted cascade of Haar wavelets. Then the eyes are searched in the face and occurring eye blinks measured by analyzing the opticalflow of the q e s ’ re- gion. The perforrnance of the sysreni was rested successfully under ideal and natural conditions. Keywords: Intelligent Transport, visual driver monitoring, face detection, night vision, image processing. 1 Introduction Australia’s rural roads extend over large distances;. The sparsity of traffic, the vehicle’s comfort features and ease of manoeuvring, the typically long un-eventful distances cov- ered and the rural road environment are potential factors that contribute to increase driver monotony. While most crash causes are multifactorial, monotony has never been satis- factorily associated with the other factors that contribute to crashes. As the symptoms and causes of monotony are still unidentified the exact number of causalities or social costs due to accidents caused by monotony cannot be estimated. But as per Road Traffic Report of Queensland Goveinment [4], it is assumed that 31% of all accidents are caused by inattention and another zyxwvutsrq 5% by fatigue. Based on this report we suggest that about 20% of all accidents are caused by monotony and fall in the categories of fatigue and inatten- tion. While there is an impressive amount of literature and projects covering the problem of fatigue and drowsiness (see * 0-7803-8566-7/W20.00 @ 2004 IEEE. the publications [l] [2] zyxwv [9]) the aspect of monotony is ne- glected so far. Only in the last few years the impact of driv- ing in monotonous environments was investigated and some symptoms of monotony discovered. In a recent laboratory study the different affects of monotonous tasks on different physiological sensors and devices such as EEG, EOG, EKG, GSR and head movement detector are analyzed. The prelim- inary results concluded that the best combination of sensors to detect monotony consists of GSR (galvanic skin response) and electro-oculograph (EOG - blink rate)[ 1 I]. Empowered with such results we present an on-board monotony diagnosis module that monitors the driver’s head movements and the length of time between eye blinks be- cause we regard a stare glance as a main symptom for monotony. Furthermore, the presented system can detect the symptoms of fatigue like missing eye blinks or a nodding head. In contrast to other devices mentioned before our sys- tem is integrated in the car and does not require any sensors attached to the driver. So the driver’s comfort is not reduced by our system. Other advantages of our system are the fast computation time due to a coarse-to-fine strategy and the us- age of standard hardware to achieve a good cost-performance ratio. In the following section the physiological fundamentals of fatigue and monotony will be explained whereas in section 3 the technical details of the vision processes are described. The experimental results will be presented in section 4 before this contribution ends with our conclusions. 2 Physiological Fundamentals There is an emerging consensus among researchers in the area of road safety that monotony and fatigue represent ma- jor road safety hazards and risk factors in private and com- mercial transportation. But very often the terms fatigue and monotony are used mistakenly as synonyms. From the psy- chological and medical point of view they are different al- though both reduce the driver’s attention. Therefore we will identify the symptoms and causes of monotony and contrast it with fatigue. 6451