Real-Time Sleepiness Detection for Driver State Monitoring System

A driver face monitoring system can detect driver fatigue, which is a significant factor in many accidents, using computer vision techniques. In this paper, we present a real-time technique for driver eye state detection. First, the face is detected, and the eyes are located within the face region for tracking. A normalized cross-correlation-based online dynamic template matching technique, combined with Kalman filter tracking, is proposed to track the detected eye positions in subsequent image frames. A support vector machine with histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) features is used to classify the state of the eyes as open or closed. If the eyes remain closed for a specified period, the driver is considered to be asleep, and an alarm is triggered.

Facial expression recognition based on local region specific features and support vector machines

Facial expressions are one of the most powerful, natural and immediate means for human being to communicate their emotions and intensions. Recognition of facial expression has many applications including human-computer interaction, cognitive science, human emotion analysis, personality development etc. In this paper, we propose a new method for the recognition of facial expressions from single image frame that uses combination of appearance and geometric features with support vector machines classification. In general, appearance features for the recognition of facial expressions are computed by dividing face region into regular grid (holistic representation). But, in this paper we extracted region specific appearance features by dividing the whole face region into domain specific local regions. Geometric features are also extracted from corresponding domain specific regions. In addition, important local regions are determined by using incremental search approach which results in the reduction of feature dimension and improvement in recognition accuracy. The results of facial expressions recognition using features from domain specific regions are also compared with the results obtained using holistic representation. The performance of the proposed facial expression recognition system has been validated on publicly available extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) facial expression data sets.

Recognition of facial expressions based on salient geometric features and support vector machines

Facial expressions convey nonverbal cues which play an important role in interpersonal relations, and are widely used in behavior interpretation of emotions, cognitive science, and social interactions. In this paper we analyze different ways of representing geometric feature and present a fully automatic facial expression recognition (FER) system using salient geometric features. In geometric feature-based FER approach, the first important step is to initialize and track dense set of facial points as the expression evolves over time in consecutive frames. In the proposed system, facial points are initialized using elastic bunch graph matching (EBGM) algorithm and tracking is performed using Kanade-Lucas-Tomaci (KLT) tracker. We extract geometric features from point, line and triangle composed of tracking results of facial points. The most discriminative line and triangle features are extracted using feature selective multi-class AdaBoost with the help of extreme learning machine (ELM) classification. Finally the geometric features for FER are extracted from the boosted line, and triangles composed of facial points. The recognition accuracy using features from point, line and triangle are analyzed independently. The performance of the proposed FER system is evaluated on three different data sets: namely CK+, MMI and MUG facial expression data sets.