Driving support system is one of the most interested system in many ITS systems. Examples of such systems include distance detection systems for vehicles ahead and lane departure detection systems. These systems give warning information depending on the urgency level. To realize driving support systems excellent in human interface, it is essential to change the method or the timing to give warning information depending on the driver status. Driver status monitor detects degradation of consciousness or attention of a driver during driving, and the objects to be detected are drowsiness, inattention, excessive concentration through cellular phone use, intoxication or drugs, and fatigue, or other factors. The detection object of the developed system is drowsiness and inattention. In this driver status monitor system, the method or the timing for offering information to a driver is changed according to the level of the consciousness or the attention of a driver, and the media or its method to offer information is changed according to assent or urgency level of the information. The purpose of this study is to realize a system that wins driver's confidence by the ways mentioned above. The driver status monitor detects drowsiness from the change in the duration of eye closure during blinking of a driver and inattention from the change in the gaze direction. This paper has described the detection technique of the gaze direction that has been developed to detect inattention of a driver during driving among driver's status. The eye areas are extracted and tracked from the facial images captured by a camera installed in a rear-view mirror. The facial direction and the gaze direction are detected separately from the extracted eye areas.
Detection of Facial Direction
The direction and the angle of a face are calculated from the distance between the gravities of two eyes and the center point of nose.
Detection of Gaze Direction
The positions of the pupil and the inner corner of the eye are detected from the extracted image of the eye area, and then the gaze direction is calculated from the relative distance between the two positions.
And it is shown from verification experiments that this method is applicable to the inattention detection.Many studies concerning detection of the gaze direction have been performed mostly as a part of human interface studies or one of the visibility evaluations of display. But these kinds of studies for inattention detection are few. This paper has described the above- mentioned contents in detail.
