A Framework for Instantaneous Driver Drowsiness Detection Based on Improved HOG Features and Naïve Bayesian Classification

Due to their high distinctiveness, robustness to illumination and simple computation, Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) features have attracted much attention and achieved remarkable success in many computer vision tasks. In this paper, an innovative framework for driver drowsiness detection is proposed, where an adaptive descriptor that possesses the virtue of distinctiveness, robustness and compactness is formed from an improved version of HOG features based on binarized histograms of shifted orientations. The final HOG descriptor generated from binarized HOG features is fed to the trained Naïve Bayes (NB) classifier to make the final driver drowsiness determination. Experimental results on the publicly available NTHU-DDD dataset verify that the proposed framework has the potential to be a strong contender for several state-of-the-art baselines, by achieving a competitive detection accuracy of 85.62%, without loss of efficiency or stability.