Efficient and compact face descriptor for driver drowsiness detection

摘要

Current advances in driver drowsiness detection consist of a variety of innovative technologies generally based on driver state monitoring systems. Extracting effective and relevant features to characterize drowsy symptoms in images and videos is still an open topic. In this work, we introduce a face monitoring system based on a compact face texture descriptor able to cover the most discriminant drowsy features. The compactness has been achieved by both a multi-scale pyramidal face representation that capture the main characteristics of local and global information, and the feature selection process applied on the raw extracted features. The proposed framework is rolled out in four phases: (i) face detection and alignment; (ii) Pyramid-Multi Level (PML) face representation; (iii) face description using a multi-level multi scale feature extraction; and (vi) feature subset selection and classification. Experiments conducted on the public dataset NTH Drowsy Driver Detection (NTHUDDD) show the effectiveness of the proposed face descriptor and the associated selection schemes. The results show that the proposed method compares favorably with several approaches including those based on deep Convolutional Neural Networks.