According to the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC), driving fatigue is responsible for around 20% of traffic accidents involving commercial transport vehicles in the European Union. These are the same data shown by ERTICO (formerly eSafety Forum), which highlights this problem in professional drivers who spend long days working on the road. Reducing or controlling driver fatigue alone could help halve traffic deaths.
Examples outside of Europe raise similar concerns. In Korea, from 2013 to 2015, the death rate from accidents caused by drowsy drivers on expressways was 26.9 people (per 100 accidents), which was four times the rate for all accidents. While a report by Caterpillar on Australian mines showed that operator fatigue is one of the most frequent root causes of earthmoving equipment (large vehicles used in mining such as excavators and bulldozers) accidents within the mining industry . In the public sector, too, driver drowsiness and inattention are key contributing factors to commercial truck accidents, which account for thousands of deaths and injuries each year in the industry. Meanwhile, human error is responsible for around 93% of haul truck accidents in surface mining, and up to 70% of these are fatigue related.
On the other hand, we see how facial detection systems are gaining ground around the world. Although affected by privacy laws and regulations in Europe, it is now possible in countries like China to authorize payments, provide access to facilities, and track criminals with systems based on them.
Some tech companies have already begun integrating face detection into the design of driving safety systems. The most popular systems are capable of detecting driver fatigue, distraction and inappropriate behavior. These systems consist of modules for head-shoulder detection, face detection, eye detection, eye opening estimation, fusion, sleepiness measurement percentage of eyelid closure estimation, and fatigue level classification. They are based on fusion algorithms that estimate the state of the eyes and other actions or state of normal faces.
The driver monitoring system offered by Azimut detects fatigue by controlling the closing of the eyelids, as well as other potential threats, such as smoking, talking on a phone or not looking at the road. A camera installed at the top of the dashboard continuously measures your face and behavior by observing the direction of the driver's face and detecting if they close their eyes.
If the system detects any of these behaviors, an alarm is activated on the bus, combining a noise with a visual signal on a dashboard screen (and the vibration of a motor placed on the seat?). If the alarm does not go off, a dispatcher in the control room will be alerted to the problem via a back-end application. In addition, the system allows you to send a photo or a short video in real time as evidence. Various actions will follow according to each operator procedure, such as calling the driver, recommending him a break, taking him out of service, etc.
The Azimut DSM system is fully configurable to automate the actions that follow each type of alarm and the procedure defined by each bus or coach operator. Some key benefits of the Azimut facial recognition system include an advanced algorithm to detect driver fatigue, ability to differentiate various other alerts (phone, smoking, distracted appearance), robust mobility hardware, powerful back-end system, and full interoperability with other Azimuth CCTV systems.
Although it is not yet mandatory on buses in continental Europe, it is certainly an unavoidable addition for operators interested in increasing the safety measures of their vehicles while better understanding the issues related to their key employees, the drivers.
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