Eye-Gesture Analysis for Driver Hazard Awareness

Because road traffic accidents are a major source of death worldwide, attempts have been made to create Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) able to detect vehicle, driver and environmental conditions that are cues for possible potential accidents. This paper presents continued work on a novel Nonintrusive Intelligent Driver Assistance and Safety System (Ni-DASS) for assessing driver attention and hazard awareness. It uses two onboard CCD cameras – one observing the road and the other observing the driver’s face. The windscreen is divided into cells and analysis of the driver’s eye-gaze patterns allows Ni-DASS to determine the windscreen cell the driver is focusing on using eye-gesture templates. Intersecting the driver’s field of view through the observed windscreen cell with subsections of the camera’s field of view containing a potential hazard allows Ni-DASS to estimate the probability that the driver has actually observed the hazard. Results have shown that the proposed technique is an accurate enough measure of driver observation to be useful in ADAS systems. Keywords—Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), Driver Hazard Awareness, Driver Vigilance, Eye Tracking