Design and implementation of a real-time eye tracking system

Driver fatigue severely affects driver's alertness and ability to drive safely. There are vital problems related to drivers fatigue on driving of trains, vehicles and airplanes. Therefore, the driver fatigue research is important. In this paper, we first study the impact of eye locations on face recognition accuracy, with Haar-like feature and AdaBoost classifier, face and eye area can be detected quickly and accurately. In the part of eye tracking, cam-shift based mean-shift algorithm is used to track the eyes. This method could automatically adjust the size of tracking window according to the different posture of driver. The performance of our eye detection method is validated by using image database with more than 6000 pictures. In addition, our real-time eye tracking system has been tested on railway line segment (China). There are 5 train drivers involved in the experiment. The validation shows that our eye detector has an overall 93% eye detection rate.