This thesis presents a noninvasive approach to detect drowsiness of drivers using behavioral and vehicle based measuring techniques. The system accepts stream of driver's images from a camera and steering wheel movement from G-27 Logitech racing wheel system. It first describes a standalone implementation of the behavioral based drowsiness detection method. The method accepts the input images and analyzes the facial expressions of the driver through sets of processing stages. In order to improve the reliability of the system, we also proposed a comprehensive approach of combining the facial expression analysis with a steering wheel data analysis in decision level as well as feature level integration. We also presented a new approach of modeling the temporal information of facial expressions of drowsiness using HMM. Each proposed approach has been implemented in a simulated driving setup. The detection performance of each method is evaluated through experiments and its parameter settings were optimized. Finally we present a case study which discusses the practicality of our system in a small-scaled intelligent transportation system where it switches the driving mechanism between manual and autonomous control depending on the state of the driver.Electrical Engineerin
