Estimation of drowsiness level based on eyelid closure and heart rate variability.

This paper presents a novel method that uses eyelid closure and heart rate variability to estimate the driver's drowsiness level. Laboratory experiments were conducted by using a proprietary driving simulator, which induced drowsiness among the test drivers. The purposes of these experiments were to obtain the electrocardiogram (ECG) and the eye-blink video sequences. Also the drivers were monitored through a video camera. The changes in facial expression of the drivers were used as a standard index of drowsiness level. Error-Correcting Output Coding (ECOC) was employed as a multi-class classifier to estimate the drowsiness level. We extended the ordinary ECOC using a loss function for decoding procedure to obtain class tendencies of each drowsiness level. We used the Loss-based Decoding ECOC (LD-ECOC) to classify the drowsiness level. As a result, we obtained an extraordinarily high accuracy for estimation of drowsiness level.