Real-Time Drowsiness Detection Using Dual MobileNetV2 Models on Desktop and Edge Devices

Abstract

Drowsiness is a leading cause of human error in transportation and in shift-based occupational work, yet delivering reliable real-time detection on affordable, resource-constrained hardware remains difficult. This study aims to develop and evaluate a vision-based drowsiness detection system that behaves consistently across a full-power desktop and a low-cost edge device. The system couples two independent MobileNetV2 transfer-learning classifiers — one for eye state (Open/Closed) and one for mouth state (Yawn/No_yawn) — with a temporal decision engine that converts frame-level predictions into microsleep and excessive-yawning alerts. Both classifiers were trained on a merged multi-source dataset (8,548 training images) and evaluated with a class-balanced protocol (186 images/class for the eye branch and 448 images/class for the mouth branch) to remove test-set imbalance bias. The decision engine was realised as two platform-appropriate pipelines that share an offline-first, retry-capable event architecture: a duration-based, two-tier hysteresis alert on a desktop application (Haar-cascade detection, H5/float32 models) and a frame-count alert designed for a Raspberry Pi 5 edge board (MediaPipe detection, quantised TensorFlow Lite models). On the class-balanced test set the eye branch reached 95.16% (H5) / 95.97% (TFLite) accuracy and the mouth branch reached 96.65% for both formats, with above-99% cross-format prediction agreement. Converting to TFLite cut model size by 73.4% (8.99 to 2.39 MB) and single-frame model inference latency roughly thirteen-fold (about 25 to 1.9 ms, measured on the development machine). Real-time desktop sessions sustained 6.9–12.0 FPS, and the Haar detector located a face in only 15.8% of off-angle frames versus 96.9–98.6% of frontal frames. This single-session result offers a preliminary, rather than definitive, indication of the detector's pose sensitivity. A lightweight dual-MobileNetV2 design with platform-appropriate detectors shows promise for delivering consistent real-time drowsiness alerts across heterogeneous hardware tiers.