Blink Rate Monitoring for a Driver Awareness System

We describe a working prototype computer vision system for measuring the blink rate of car drivers. It combines an intelligent face recognition system with feature tracking, and statistical image analysis methods to locate and track the head position of a driver in a car, and extract specific measurements from the eyes. This is done using standard hardware (a Sun IPC workstation and frame grabber) without the use of image processing or other specialised hardware. The information obtained is used to give an indication of driver alertness which forms one of the inputs to a complete driver monitoring system.