Fatigue driving is one of the crucial factors causing traffic accidents. Most existing fatigue driving detection algorithms overlook individual driver characteristics, potentially leading to misjudgments. This article presents a novel detection algorithm that utilizes facial multi-feature fusion, thoroughly considering the driver’s individual characteristics. To improve the judging accuracy of the driver’s facial expressions, a personalized threshold is proposed based on the normalization of the driver’s eyes and mouth opening and closing instead of the traditional average threshold, as individual drivers have different eye and mouth sizes. Given the dynamic changes in fatigue level, a sliding window model is designed for further calculating blinking duration ratio (BF), yawning frequency (YF), and nodding frequency (NF), and these evaluation indexes are used in the feature fusion model. The reliability of the algorithm is verified by the actual test results, which show that the detection accuracy reaches 95.6% and shows good application potential in fatigue detection applications. In this way, facial multi-feature fusion and fully considering the driver’s individual characteristics makes fatigue driving detection more accurate.

Driver fatigue is a primary factor in traffic accidents and poses a serious threat to road safety. To address this issue, this paper proposes a multi-feature fusion fatigue detection method based on an improved YOLOv8 model. First, the method uses an enhanced YOLOv8 model to achieve high-precision face detection. Then, it crops the detected face regions. Next, the lightweight PFLD (Practical Facial Landmark Detector) model performs keypoint detection on the cropped images, extracting 68 facial feature points and calculating key indicators related to fatigue status. These indicators include the eye aspect ratio (EAR), eyelid closure percentage (PERCLOS), mouth aspect ratio (MAR), and head posture ratio (HPR). To mitigate the impact of individual differences on detection accuracy, the paper introduces a novel sliding window model that combines a dynamic threshold adjustment strategy with an exponential weighted moving average (EWMA) algorithm. Based on this framework, blink frequency (BF), yawn frequency (YF), and nod frequency (NF) are calculated to extract time-series behavioral features related to fatigue. Finally, the driver’s fatigue state is determined using a comprehensive fatigue assessment algorithm. Experimental results on the WIDER FACE and YAWDD datasets demonstrate this method’s significant advantages in improving detection accuracy and computational efficiency. By striking a better balance between real-time performance and accuracy, the proposed method shows promise for real-world driving applications.