Journey tracker: driver alerting system with a deep learning approach

Front Robot AI. 2024 Oct 4:11:1433795. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2024.1433795. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Negligence of public transport drivers due to drowsiness poses risks not only to their own lives but also to the lives of passengers. The designed journey tracker system alerts the drivers and activates potential penalties. A custom EfficientNet model architecture, based on EfficientNet design principles, is built and trained using the Media Research Lab (MRL) eye dataset. Reflections in frames are filtered out to ensure accurate detections. A 10 min initial period is utilized to understand the driver's baseline behavior, enhancing the reliability of drowsiness detections. Input from drivers is considered to determine the frame rate for more precise real-time monitoring. Only the eye regions of individual drivers are captured to maintain privacy and ethical standards, fostering driver comfort. Hyperparameter tuning and testing of different activation functions during model training aim to strike a balance between model complexity, performance and computational cost. Obtained an accuracy rate of 95% and results demonstrate that the "swish" activation function outperforms ReLU, sigmoid and tanh activation functions in extracting hierarchical features. Additionally, models trained from scratch exhibit superior performance compared to pretrained models. This system promotes safer public transportation and enhances professionalism by monitoring driver alertness. The system detects closed eyes and performs a cross-reference using personalization data and pupil detection to trigger appropriate alerts and impose penalties.

Keywords: baseline behavior; custom EfficientNet; media research lab; pupil detection; swish activation function.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The authors gratefully acknowledge JSS Science and Technology University, Mysuru, India, for their support in allowing us to conduct this research and for providing access to necessary resources. The work of FF was partly supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract no. 23.00321 (Academics4Rail project). The project has been selected within the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement HORIZON-ER-JU-2022-ExplR-04. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the funding agencies, which cannot be held responsible for them.