Real-Time Driver Drowsiness Detection for Embedded System Using Model Compression of Deep Neural Networks

Driver’s status is crucial because one of the main reasons for motor vehicular accidents is related to driver’s inattention or drowsiness. Drowsiness detector on a car can reduce numerous accidents. Accidents occur because of a single moment of negligence, thus driver monitoring system which works in real-time is necessary. This detector should be deployable to an embedded device and perform at high accuracy. In this paper, a novel approach towards real-time drowsiness detection based on deep learning which can be implemented on a low cost embedded board and performs with a high accuracy is proposed. Main contribution of our paper is compression of heavy baseline model to a light weight model deployable to an embedded board. Moreover, minimized network structure was designed based on facial landmark input to recognize whether driver is drowsy or not. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 89.5% on 3-class classification and speed of 14.9 frames per second (FPS) on Jetson TK1.