Page No. 48-57: Navigator/OOW Fatigue Detection and Alarming System

Abstract

Fatigue “concerns the inability or disinclination to continue an activity, generally because the activity has been going on for too long” example (4 hours watch on bridge). The causes of fatigue can be physical, physiological, or psychological (Lal & Craig, 2001). There is no standard fatigue measurement, because the direct measures are few (Williamson & Chamberlain, 2005). Most measures are of the outcomes of fatigue rather than of fatigue itself. To overcome fatigue, human beings need to sleep. Sleep is essential and inescapable solution for fatigue. In case of fatigue, sleep will overpower any effort to remain awake (NCSDR/NHTSA, 1998). Therefore, the best fatigue measurement is drowsiness which is the clearest outcome of fatigue. Detecting drowsiness and taking action to prevent it while navigating is not an easy task. Moreover, detecting fatigue/drowsiness depending on visual information only, adds more restricts on the reliability of the fatigue measurement. This is because it depends mainly on pattern recognition of facial gestures. One of the bottlenecks challenges of object recognition, in general, is finding efficient and discriminative descriptors that are invariant even in difficult illumination.