An “FPGA Drowsiness Warning System”, developed by two DTU Electrical Engineering students, Nguyen The Duc and Ho Van Chuong, received strong recognition at the 2018 Asian Intel Innovative FPGA competition for its practicality and convenience.
Warning drivers falling asleep
Ho Van Chuong stated that they developed their project using the Terasic DE10-Nano tools provided by the sponsor, in conjunction with Machine Learning image processing technology and some SVM algorithms.
Ta Quoc Viet (standing) advises Nguyen The Duc and Ho Van Chuong
“When the system is installed in a car, a camera facing the driver takes facial images at five frames per second. Algorithms programmed into the system detect the frequency of eye-blinks and compare the rate with previous records. The system sounds a warning when it detects that the driver may be falling asleep, and the driver’s fatigue is recorded hour-by-hour to give an early warning and prevent accidents. To complete our project, the team applied what we had learned about microcontrollers and embedded systems to integrate different support tools to create a really stable and accurate system.”, Nguyen The Duc said.
They also spent much time experimenting in the DTU labs and sometimes worked late. Their dedication to the project enabled them to overcome problems perfecting the system.
Duc said: "We were fortunate and grateful for the guidance we received from our lecturers, especially Mr. Tran Le Thang Dong and Engineer Ta Quoc Viet."
Participating in international competitions
The 2017 International Intel Innovate FPGA competition, sponsored by the American companies Intel and Terasic, specializes in embedded systems design. Students, engineers, lecturers and companies involved in embedded systems compete to exhibit their design skills. The contest, which began in December 2017, is divided into four regions, the Americas, Europe-Middle East-Africa, Greater China and Asia-Pacific, with one hundred projects submitted.
The system is installed in cars to prevent accidents (Photo taken by AN)
“We were proud that our “FPGA Drowsiness Warning System” was the only Vietnamese product amongst the leading international contenders and that we won an Excellence Award.” Duc said.
(Media Center)