Method and system for detecting a driving state of a driver in a vehicle

A system for detecting a driving state of a driver of a vehicle, comprising:

• an image capturing unit for capturing consecutively images of the driver in the vehicle to generate a series of image frames;
• a processing unit coupled to said image capturing unit, receiving the image frames from said image capturing unit, and operable to process the image frames to establish a face recognition standard corresponding to an environmental condition within the vehicle upon movement of the vehicle;
• and
• a detecting unit coupled to said processing unit for detecting the environmental condition during movement of the vehicle, said detecting unit outputting a trigger signal to said processing unit upon detecting a variance in the environmental condition;
• wherein said processing unit
• generates a corrected face recognition standard corresponding to the environmental condition with the variance based on the image frames from said image capturing unit upon receipt of the trigger signal from said detecting unit,
• updates the face recognition standard with the corrected face recognition standard, and
• determines, based on the corrected face recognition standard and the image frames from said image capturing unit, whether the driving state of the driver is a dangerous state, where the driver's face does not face a front windshield of the vehicle or where the driver's face faces the front windshield of the vehicle but at least one of the driver's eyes is closed;
• wherein:
• said processing unit is operable to generate a face detection result of a number of the image frames from said image capturing unit upon generation the corrected face recognition standard and to determine whether the face detection result matches the corrected face recognition standard;
• and
• when said processing unit determines that the face detection result does not match the corrected face recognition standard, the driving state of the driver is the dangerous state;
• wherein each of the face recognition standard and the corrected face recognition standard is associated with a facial feature of the driver that includes a portion of the driver's face with at least one of eyes, nose and mouth;
• and
• wherein said processing unit is operable so that:
• each of the face recognition standard and the corrected face recognition standard includes a first threshold value that is associated with face detection scores of sub-image frames of the image frames corresponding to the portion of the driver's face;
• the face detection result includes a first detection value that is an average value of face detection scores of sub-image frames of the number of the image frames corresponding to the portion of the driver's face;
• and
• when the first detection value is less than the first threshold value of the corrected face recognition standard, the face detection result does not match the corrected face recognition standard, and the dangerous state indicates that the driver's face does not face the front windshield of the vehicle.