Long-term Multi-granularity Deep Framework for Driver Drowsiness Detection

For real-world driver drowsiness detection from videos, the variation of head pose is so large that the existing methods on global face is not capable of extracting effective features, such as looking aside and lowering head. Temporal dependencies with variable length are also rarely considered by the previous approaches, e.g., yawning and speaking. In this paper, we propose a Long-term Multi-granularity Deep Framework to detect driver drowsiness in driving videos containing the frontal faces. The framework includes two key components: (1) Multi-granularity Convolutional Neural Network (MCNN), a novel network utilizes a group of parallel CNN extractors on well-aligned facial patches of different granularities, and extracts facial representations effectively for large variation of head pose, furthermore, it can flexibly fuse both detailed appearance clues of the main parts and local to global spatial constraints; (2) a deep Long Short Term Memory network is applied on facial representations to explore long-term relationships with variable length over sequential frames, which is capable to distinguish the states with temporal dependencies, such as blinking and closing eyes. Our approach achieves 90.05% accuracy and about 37 fps speed on the evaluation set of the public NTHU-DDD dataset, which is the state-of-the-art method on driver drowsiness detection. Moreover, we build a new dataset named FI-DDD, which is of higher precision of drowsy locations in temporal dimension.