Detection of Drowsiness among Drivers Using Novel Deep Convolutional Neural Network Model

Detecting drowsiness among drivers is critical for ensuring road safety and preventing accidents caused by drowsy or fatigued driving. Research on yawn detection among drivers has great significance in improving traffic safety. Although various studies have taken place where deep learning-based approaches are being proposed, there is still room for improvement to develop better and more accurate drowsiness detection systems using behavioral features such as mouth and eye movement. This study proposes a deep neural network architecture for drowsiness detection employing a convolutional neural network (CNN) for driver drowsiness detection. Experiments involve using the DLIB library to locate key facial points to calculate the mouth aspect ratio (MAR). To compensate for the small dataset, data augmentation is performed for the ‘yawning’ and ‘no_yawning’ classes. Models are trained and tested involving the original and augmented dataset to analyze the impact on model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CNN model achieves an average accuracy of 96.69%. Performance comparison with existing state-of-the-art approaches shows better performance of the proposed model.