YawDD+: Frame-level Annotations for Accurate Yawn Prediction

Driver fatigue remains a leading cause of road accidents, with 24\% of crashes involving drowsy drivers. While yawning serves as an early behavioral indicator of fatigue, existing machine learning approaches face significant challenges due to video-annotated datasets that introduce systematic noise from coarse temporal annotations. We develop a semi-automated labeling pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification, which we apply to YawDD, enabling more accurate model training. Training the established MNasNet classifier and YOLOv11 detector architectures on YawDD+ improves frame accuracy by up to 6\% and mAP by 5\% over video-level supervision, achieving 99.34\% classification accuracy and 95.69\% detection mAP. The resulting approach deliver up to 59.8 FPS on edge AI hardware (NVIDIA Jetson Nano), confirming that enhanced data quality alone supports on-device yawning monitoring without server-side computation.