Patent ID: 8300891

Claim:
A facial image recognition system for a driver of a vehicle comprising: an image capturing unit for capturing facial images of the driver; an image processing unit electrically coupled to said image capturing unit and having installed therein a facial frame selecting and position correcting method and an identification comparison algorithm, said image processing unit receiving the facial images of the driver from said image capturing unit, when the vehicle is stopped, said image processing unit utilizing said facial frame selecting and position correcting method to frame the facial images, and according to positional relations among facial features of the facial images, to correct the facial images, said image processing unit further utilizing said identification comparison algorithm to estimate a Euclidean distance of image features of the facial images in adjacent time intervals of a Fisher-face eigenspace to determine a possible point in time at which the driver may have switched with a substitute driver, and to determine whether an identification of the driver has changed using a mean of Euclidean distances from the image features to an origin in the Fisher-face eigenspace at intervals before and after said point in time at which the driver may have switched with a substitute driver; and a warning unit electrically coupled to said image processing unit, said warning unit emitting a warning signal when said image processing unit determines that the identification of the driver has changed.