INSPIRATION Drowsy Driving was inspired by a recent incident that happened to one of our professors. Unfortunately, she met with an accident because she was falling asleep as she was driving. But, more alarmingly, according to the CDC every 1 in 25 adult drivers fall asleep at the wheel and meet with an accident.
LEARNING & BUILDING Working on Drowsy Driving at HackUTD has been a huge learning curve for every member on our team. From starting as novice students, we learned how computer vision integrates with python libraries to produce a facial recognition model that uses a videostream as an input and recognizes just the eye portion of the face and returns whether the eyes are closed or open. In addition to that, this is our first hardware hack.
In order to integrate the client (the user) and the server (facial recognition model) we used the WebSocket API method. The WebSocket API makes it possible for there to be a two way interactive communication to send and receive messages between the client and the server.