16th February 2021
• Driver state monitoring system (DSMS) is a system based on a camera to monitor driver alertness, that not only recognizes the driver, but also checks his level of vigilance. The purpose of the Driver Monitoring system is to alert the driver when signs of drowsiness or distraction are detected.
• The DSMS was introduced by BharatBenz in 2018 on all it’s premium variants of the heavy-duty truck range and is also available for order on other heavy-duty models and as an aftersales solution for existing heavy-duty customer vehicles.
News source : Edited by TruckIndia, Image source : BharatBenz
• DSM aims to avoid dangerous situations of drivers falling asleep or otherwise being distracted at the wheel. To do so, the BharatBenz DSM employs state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and computer vision technologies to identify facial patterns including eyes, face, head gaze, and other natural cues. Based on this, it is able to differentiate between safe driving conditions, or driver drowsiness and inattentiveness — in this case, it gives an acoustic and visual alert. The system is trained for most ethnicities and eye wears, can handle various headgears and works in day and night conditions.
• The system detects driver drowsiness by reading the facial features and in particular the eyes of the driver. For that a smart camera, which derives information about the condition of the driver is mounted on the A-pillar of the truck. It constantly observes the driver’s face during operation. The visual system detects the human face and analyses different facial expressions and cues like eye closure, abnormal blink frequency, and head-jerks to estimate the driver’s attention level. The system can effectively differentiate between an eye blink and prolonged eye closure (more than two seconds) and generates a warning in the form of various alert sounds. The system also generates warnings in case the driver is not looking straight ahead on the road and in case of an obstructed camera.
• From a technical standpoint, the system uses very modest and cost effective hardware. The combination of efficient hardware along with the state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithm has ensured that the system would perform well even in variable situations such as different illumination conditions (especially low light conditions), different users, different head and eye gear and vibrations due to vehicle movement.
• The system functions according to a simple three-step process. First, the installed cameras continuously monitor the driver and collect the data while connected to the main processing unit. Second, the image processing algorithms continuously analyse and detect the driver’s drowsiness status. Finally, based on the available information the system issues an audio/visual warning in case it detects driver drowsiness. In doing so, DSM requires a simple set of hardware components consisting of a control module and a vision box (camera module and infrared LEDs) that are connected with each other through a cable.
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