Driver Attention Detection Based on Improved YOLOv5

In response to negative impacts such as personal and property safety hazards caused by drivers being distracted while driving on the road, this article proposes a driver’s attention state-detection method based on the improved You Only Look Once version five (YOLOv5). Both fatigue and distracted behavior can cause a driver’s attention to be diverted during the driving process. Firstly, key facial points of the driver are located, and the aspect ratio of the eyes and mouth is calculated. Through the examination of relevant information and repeated experimental verification, threshold values for the aspect ratio of the eyes and mouth under fatigue conditions, corresponding to closed eyes and yawning, are established. By calculating the aspect ratio of the driver’s eyes and mouth, it is possible to accurately detect whether the driver is in a state of fatigue. Secondly, distracted abnormal behavior is detected using an improved YOLOv5 model. The backbone network feature extraction element is modified by adding specific modules to obtain different receptive fields through multiple convolution operations on the input feature map, thereby enhancing the feature extraction ability of the network. The introduction of Swin Transformer modules in the feature fusion network replaces the Bottleneck modules in the C3 module, reducing the computational complexity of the model while increasing its receptive field. Additionally, the network connection in the feature fusion element has been modified to enhance its ability to fuse information from feature maps of different sizes. Three datasets were created of distracting behaviors commonly observed during driving: smoking, drinking water, and using a mobile phone. These datasets were used to train and test the model. After testing, the mAP (mean average precision) has improved by 2.4% compared to the model before improvement. Finally, through comparison and ablation experiments, the feasibility of this method has been verified, which can effectively detect fatigue and distracted abnormal behavior.