Patent ID: 8552873

Claim:
A method of detecting a driving state of a driver in a vehicle, comprising the steps of: a) capturing consecutively images of the driver in the vehicle to generate a series of image frames; b) establishing a face recognition standard corresponding to an environmental condition within the vehicle based on the image frames generated in step a) upon movement of the vehicle; c) during movement of the vehicle, determining whether there is a variance in the environmental condition; d) upon determining that there is a variance in the environmental condition, updating the face recognition standard with a corrected face recognition standard that corresponds to the environmental condition with the variance and that is generated based on the image frames generated in step a) under the environmental condition with the variance; and e) determining, based on the corrected face recognition standard, and the image frames generated after the corrected face recognition standard is generated, 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 step e) further includes the sub-steps of: e-1) generating a face detection result of a number of the image frames generated in step a) upon generation the corrected face recognition standard; and e-2) determining whether the face detection result generated in sub-step e-1) matches the corrected face recognition standard, the driving state of the driver being in the dangerous state upon determining that the face detection result does not match the corrected face recognition standard; wherein each of the face recognition standard and the corrected face recognition standard is associated with a facial feature of the driver that corresponds a portion of the driver's face with at least one of eyes, nose and mouth; and wherein: each of the face recognition standard and the corrected face recognition standard includes a first threshold value that is obtained from 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 threshold standard, and the dangerous state indicates that the driver's face does not face the front windshield of the vehicle.