This technology will prevent car accidents

You are driving your car on a long stretch of road and you are exhausted after a long day at work. Your eyes begin to droop. You start to doze off unaware of the 18 wheeler that you are approaching quickly. Your eyes are now completely closed at exactly the wrong time — when you are dangerously close to the truck. But then a loud siren sound goes off in your phone. You wake up with a jerk and hit the break on time. The saviour here was not luck, but technology. Your phone camera had seen your eyes closing and it woke you up. This was made possible using “computer vision” technology that we will be discussing in this article.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) analysis data indicates that drowsiness while driving is a contributing factor for road accidents and it results in 4–6 times higher crash risk relative to alert drivers. Most of the fatal road accidents occur at speeds greater than 70 Kmph. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that India has the worst road conditions in the world resulting approximately two and a half lakh deaths in 2010 and 2011.

The system requires a smartphone with an application designed to do the protection. The smartphone camera will constantly monitor the driver’s facial expressions, namely eyes and mouth. If the eyes begin to droop or the mouth begins to open wide for more than a standard time duration, the system will trigger the alarm. The application will be designed to smartly detect the surrounding light and access the flashlight of the smartphone camera automatically.

In this application, we aim to concatenate eye detection and mouth detection by determining the moment when closed eyes and open mouth are simultaneously observed, so that a robust detection level can be achieved. For this implementation to be realistic, we plan on using the smartphone camera for real time images to be processed.

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