Esra Vural

Drowsy driver detection through facial movement analysis

The advance of computing technology has provided the means for building intelligent vehicle systems. Drowsy driver detection system is one of the potential applications of intelligent vehicle systems. Previous approaches to drowsiness detection primarily make preassumptions about the relevant behavior, focusing on blink rate, eye closure, and yawning. Here we employ machine learning to datamine actual human behavior during drowsiness episodes. Automatic classifiers for 30 facial actions from the Facial Action Coding system were developed using machine learning on a separate database of spontaneous expressions. These facial actions include blinking and yawn motions, as well as a number of other facial movements. In addition, head motion was collected through automatic eye tracking and an accelerometer. These measures were passed to learning-based classifiers such as Adaboost and multinomial ridge regression. The system was able to predict sleep and crash episodes during a driving computer game with 96% accuracy within subjects and above 90% accuracy across subjects. This is the highest prediction rate reported to date for detecting real drowsiness. Moreover, the analysis revealed new information about human behavior during drowsy driving.

Machine Learning Systems for Detecting Driver Drowsiness

Drowsy driver detection is one of the potential applications of intelligent vehicle systems. Previous approaches to drowsiness detection primarily make pre-assumptions about the relevant behavior, focusing on blink rate, eye closure, and yawning. Here we employ machine learning to datamine actual human behavior during drowsiness episodes. Automatic classifiers for 30 facial actions from the facial action coding system were developed using machine learning on a separate database of spontaneous expressions. These facial actions include blinking and yawn motions, as well as a number of other facial movements. These measures were passed to learning-based classifiers such as Adaboost and multinomial ridge regression. Head motion information was collected through automatic eye tracking and an accelerometer. The system was able to predict sleep and crash episodes on a simulator with 98% accuracy across subjects. It is the highest prediction rate reported to date for detecting drowsiness. Moreover, the analysis revealed new information about human facial behavior for drowsy drivers.

Data Mining Spontaneous Facial Behavior with Automatic Expression Coding

The computer vision field has advanced to the point that we are now able to begin to apply automatic facial expression recognition systems to important research questions in behavioral science. The machine perception lab at UC San Diego has developed a system based on machine learning for fully automated detection of 30 actions from the facial action coding system (FACS). The system, called Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT), operates in real-time and is robust to the video conditions in real applications. This paper describes two experiments which are the first applications of this system to analyzing spontaneous human behavior: Automated discrimination of posed from genuine expressions of pain, and automated detection of driver drowsiness. The analysis revealed information about facial behavior during these conditions that were previously unknown, including the coupling of movements. Automated classifiers were able to differentiate real from fake pain significantly better than naive human subjects, and to detect critical drowsiness above 98% accuracy. Issues for application of machine learning systems to facial expression analysis are discussed.

An online handwriting recognition system for Turkish

An online handwritten text recognition system for Turkish has been developed using a tablet PC as an interface. In recent years, although there have been great developments in tablet PC technology, there are still no applications for recognition in the Turkish language. We have developed a prototype system using hidden Markov models which recognizes handwritten words from a small vocabulary list. This system has achieved a recognition rate of over 90%.

Detecting driver drowsiness using computer vision techniques

The advance of computing technology has provided the means for building intelligent vehicle systems. Drowsy driver detection system is one of the potential applications of intelligent vehicle systems. Here we employ machine learning techniques to detect driver drowsiness. The system obtained 98% performance in predicting driver drowsiness. This is the highest prediction rate reported to date for detecting real drowsiness. Moreover, the analysis revealed new information about human behavior during drowsy driving.