A convolutional neural network -based driver monitoring system for drowsiness and distraction detection

Abstract

Road accidents caused by driver drowsiness and distraction are a major global concern, as fatigue and inattention significantly slow reaction time and increase accident risk. To address this issue, this paper proposes a vision-based driver monitoring system using facial analysis from an on-board camera. The system detects the face and extracts key regions of interest, including the eyes, mouth, and head, which are analyzed independently using convolutional neural networks. Temporal information is captured by aggregating the convolutional neural network (CNN) outputs over a fixed time window. Drowsiness is estimated by fusing eye and mouth features with a multilayer perceptron, while distraction is detected based on head movements. An important advantage of the proposed approach is its robustness to partial input loss, allowing the system to remain functional even when some facial regions are missing or occluded, such as when wearing sunglasses or face masks. Experimental results show high detection accuracy, reaching 97.3% for drowsiness and 98% for distraction under ideal conditions, with only limited performance degradation in challenging scenarios. These results confirm the suitability of the proposed system for real-time driver monitoring applications.