Vision Transformers and YoloV5 based Driver Drowsiness Detection Framework

Human drivers have distinct driving techniques, knowledge, and sentiments due to unique driving traits. Driver drowsiness has been a serious issue endangering road safety; therefore, it is essential to design an effective drowsiness detection algorithm to bypass road accidents. Miscellaneous research efforts have been approached the problem of detecting anomalous human driver behaviour to examine the frontal face of the driver and automobile dynamics via computer vision techniques. Still, the conventional methods cannot capture complicated driver behaviour features. However, with the origin of deep learning architectures, a substantial amount of research has also been executed to analyze and recognize driver's drowsiness using neural network algorithms. This paper introduces a novel framework based on vision transformers and YoloV5 architectures for driver drowsiness recognition. A custom YoloV5 pre-trained architecture is proposed for face extraction with the aim of extracting Region of Interest (ROI). Owing to the limitations of previous architectures, this paper introduces vision transformers for binary image classification which is trained and validated on a public dataset UTA-RLDD. The model had achieved 96.2\% and 97.4\% as it's training and validation accuracies respectively. For the further evaluation, proposed framework is tested on a custom dataset of 39 participants in various light circumstances and achieved 95.5\% accuracy. The conducted experimentations revealed the significant potential of our framework for practical applications in smart transportation systems.