mmDrive: Fine-grained Fatigue Driving Detection Using mmWave Radar

Early detection of fatigue driving is pivotal for the safety of drivers and pedestrians. Traditional approaches mainly employ cameras and wearable sensors to detect fatigue features, which are intrusive to drivers. Recent advances in radio frequency (RF) sensing enable non-intrusive fatigue feature detection from the signal reflected by driver’s body. However, existing RF-based solutions only detect partial or coarse-grained fatigue features, which reduces the detection accuracy. To tackle the above limitations, we propose a mmWave-based fatigue driving detection system, called mmDrive, which can detect multiple fine-grained fatigue features from different body parts. However, achieving accurate detection of various fatigue features during driving encounters practical challenges. Specifically, normal driving activities and driver’s involuntary facial movements inevitably cause interference to fatigue features. Thus, we exploit unique geometric and behavioral characteristics of fatigue features and design effective signal processing methods to remove noises from fatigue-irrelevant activities. Based on the detected fatigue features, we further develop a fatigue determination algorithm to decide the driver’s fatigue state. Extensive experiment results from both simulated and real driving environments show that the average accuracy for detecting nodding and yawning features is about 96%, and the average errors for estimating eye blink, respiration, and heartbeat rates are around 2.21 bpm, 0.54 bpm, and 2.52 bpm, respectively. And the accuracy of the fatigue detection algorithm we proposed reached 97.63%.