Real-Time Contactless Eye Blink Detection Using UWB Radar

Blink detection is essential for various human-computer interaction scenarios, such as virtual reality and driving state detection. It has gained significant attention from industry and academia alike in recent years. Existing non-contact detection systems (cameras, acoustics, etc.) have made significant progress, but various issues have prevented their widespread adoption, including privacy concerns, line-of-sight requirements, and cost issues. Therefore, there is a critical need for a simple and robust system that can detect eye blinks using common commercial equipment. In this paper, we propose BlinkRadar, which uses a low-cost customized impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radar for non-contact and fine-grained blink detection. BlinkRadar can reliably detect driver blinks in driving conditions, making it possible to infer drowsy driving. To effectively extract the eye blink signal, we analyzed real experimental data to study the characteristics of the eye blink pattern and successfully used the multi-sequence variational mode decomposition (MS-VMD) algorithm to separate the blink signal from the noise signal. We conducted extensive experiments in two different environments (a quiet room and moving vehicles) and found that BlinkRadar had an average blink detection accuracy of over 96.2%. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of using UWB radar for non-contact eye blink detection.