Citation

Massoz Q, Verly JG, Van Droogenbroeck M. Sensors (Basel) 2018; 18(9): s18092801.

Affiliation

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Faculty of Applied Science, University of Liège, B-4000 Liège, Belgium. m.vandroogenbroeck@uliege.be.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s18092801

PMID

30149629

Abstract

Drowsiness is a major cause of fatal accidents, in particular in transportation. It is therefore crucial to develop automatic, real-time drowsiness characterization systems designed to issue accurate and timely warnings of drowsiness to the driver. In practice, the least intrusive, physiology-based approach is to remotely monitor, via cameras, facial expressions indicative of drowsiness such as slow and long eye closures. Since the system's decisions are based upon facial expressions in a given time window, there exists a trade-off between accuracy (best achieved with long windows, i.e., at long timescales) and responsiveness (best achieved with short windows, i.e., at short timescales). To deal with this trade-off, we develop a multi-timescale drowsiness characterization system composed of four binary drowsiness classifiers operating at four distinct timescales (5 s, 15 s, 30 s, and 60 s) and trained jointly. We introduce a multi-timescale ground truth of drowsiness, based on the reaction times (RTs) performed during standard Psychomotor Vigilance Tasks (PVTs), that strategically enables our system to characterize drowsiness with diverse trade-offs between accuracy and responsiveness. We evaluated our system on 29 subjects via leave-one-subject-out cross-validation and obtained strong results, i.e., global accuracies of 70%, 85%, 89%, and 94% for the four classifiers operating at increasing timescales, respectively.

Language: en

Keywords

convolutional neural network; driver monitoring; drowsiness; eye closure dynamics; multi-timescale; psychomotor vigilance task; reaction time