Towards Evaluating Driver Fatigue with Robust Deep Learning Models

In this paper, we explore different deep learning based approaches to detect driver fatigue. Drowsy driving results in approximately 72,000 crashes and 44,000 injuries every year in the US and detecting drowsiness and alerting the driver can save many lives. There have been many approaches to detect fatigue, of which eye closedness detection is one. We propose a framework to detect eye closedness in a captured camera frame as a gateway for detecting drowsiness. We explore two different datasets to detect eye closedness. We develop an eye model by using new Eye-blink dataset and a face model by using the Closed Eyes in the Wild (CEW). We also explore different techniques to make the models more robust by adding noise. We achieve 95.84% accuracy on our eye model that detects eye blinking and 80.01% accuracy on our face model that detects eye blinking. We also see that we can improve our accuracy on the face model by 6% when we add noise to our training data and apply data augmentation. We hope that our work will be useful to the field of driver fatigue detection to avoid potential vehicle accidents related to drowsy driving.