Using image-extracted features to determine heart rate and blink duration for driver sleepiness detection

Heart rate and blink duration are two vital physiological signals which give information about cardiac activity and consciousness. Monitoring these two signals is crucial for various applications such as driver drowsiness detection. As there are several problems posed by the conventional systems to be used for continuous, long-term monitoring, a remote blink and ECG monitoring system can be used as an alternative. For estimating the blink duration, two strategies are used. In the first approach, pictures of open and closed eyes are fed into an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to decide whether the eyes are open or close. In the second approach, they are classified and labeled using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). The labeled images are then be used to determine the blink duration. For heart rate variability, two strategies are used to evaluate the passing blood volume: Independent Component Analysis (ICA); and a chrominance based method. Eye recognition yielded 78-92% accuracy in classifying open/closed eyes with ANN and 71-91% accuracy with LDA. Heart rate evaluations had a mean loss of around 16 Beats Per Minute (BPM) for the ICA strategy and 13 BPM for the chrominance based technique.