1. Introduction

Intoxication by means of alcohol consumption is a serious and sometimes dangerous condition that a person may fall into as far as its health, security, and the social security are concerned. Citizens have to be trained not to consume alcohol beyond the permissible limit. However, this is a societal problem and has to be encountered by the society and its mechanisms. The material of this chapter is beyond the social component of intoxication. It elaborates on the capabilities of contemporary technology to identify drunkenness and prevent intoxicated persons to be engaged in dangerous situations, that is, driving or handle critical installation.

© 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Common means of identifying drunkenness is by a breathalyzer or a blood test. Both methods require the person under test to come in touch with the device and to stand for an invasive test. Both procedures are time-consuming, especially the blood test, and they have a considerable cost. These techniques cannot be applied or used to monitor intoxication remotely and prevent drunk persons from being engaged in tasks that require the operator' s attention and are associated with security. For example, it is not efficient to perform a test with a breathalyzer before a football match if it is desirable to prevent the drunk persons entering the stadium. The material in this chapter presents ways for identifying intoxication by means of thermal infrared images of the face.

Initially, basic elements are provided regarding the limits in alcohol consumption posed in different countries, as well as the thermal behavior of the skin is analyzed. Furthermore, an analytical description of the database with sober and the corresponding drunk persons created in Electronics Laboratory Physics Department University of Patras, Greece, is provided and the experimental procedure carried out toward the completion of this database (http://www.

Intoxication Identification Using Thermal Imaging http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.72128 147

The methods for drunk identification were developed independently and the obtained features are different. It is important, in a future work the correlation between these features as far as their common information is concerned to be analyzed so that an optimal identification

The final goal of the exposed material is to achieve a drunk person identification using only its thermal images without the need of comparisons with the corresponding images obtained when the person was sober. This is achieved by most methods presented here and constitutes a significant challenge toward building a commercial product. Such a commercial product could scan the face of a person and in case he is identified as drunk, the system will prevent him of being engaged into critical procedures (driving or operating specialized infrastructure).

Alcohol that enters our body mainly during meals, if of course not too much, do not endanger us, unless there are health reasons that prohibit its consumption. However, excessive alcohol consumption may be particularly dangerous for someone who manages machinery or drives a vehicle and may have consequences on other persons as well. The effects and symptoms that alcohol brings to the human body vary according to the amount of alcohol present in the body (milligrams). The way alcohol affects the human body begins with the absorption of ethyl alcohol into the digestive system and its final appearance in the blood and exhaled air, where

Each country has set its own limits on alcohol consumption, and there are countries where zero limits have been established, such as Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Hungary. Estonia, Poland, and Sweden have placed the blood alcohol limit at 0.2 mg/mL, while Lithuania at 0.4 mg/mL. In Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain, the limit is at 0.5 mg/mL. If the blood alcohol concentration exceeds 0.5 or 0.25 mg/L of exhaled air, the driver will be fined in proportion to the level of violation of the permissible limits. These limits are reduced in the case of special vehicle drivers such as ambulances, busses, trucks over 3.5

Drinks are categorized according to the amount of alcohol they contain. Blood alcohol concentration (BAC) is different for men and women depending on their weight, the amount of drinks they consume and at different time instances after consumption. The effects on each

authorities can measure with the well-known alcoholmeters (breathalyzers).

individual according to the indication of the BAC are as follows:

procedure using all this information can be devised (information fusion).

physics.upatras.gr/sober/) is described.

2. Alcohol consumption limits

tons, motorcycles, and mopeds [15–21].

Specific algorithms are presented in this chapter and their discrimination capabilities are explained [1–13]. The original idea lies on the fact that the blood vessels' network of the face will present increased activity when the person has consumed alcohol, changing in this way, the temperature distribution on the person's face. Accordingly, a commercial system can be derived which could be used for a fast assessment of the intoxication situation. In case of a positive inference, a breathalyzer can be employed for verifying the results. Obviously, it is not possible to obtain a thermal map of the face by means of visible light. Acquiring images from faces in thermal infrared spectrum, information related to the temperature of the face is obtained which mainly depends on the physiological condition of the person (illness, exercises, and drunkenness). The human face being in a mean temperature around 300 K, radiates according to the Wien's Law as a perfect black body, with maximum at 10 μm wavelength.

Drunkenness is a challenging physiological condition to be investigated using infrared imagery. However, most of the publications in the literature refer only to automotive anti-drunk driving systems, which utilize electrical signals from the heart or brain [14]. Extensive review of the relevant literature is given throughout the material which is being developed in this Chapter. Seven different approaches are discussed in this chapter for identifying intoxication by means of thermal infrared images. Specifically:


Initially, basic elements are provided regarding the limits in alcohol consumption posed in different countries, as well as the thermal behavior of the skin is analyzed. Furthermore, an analytical description of the database with sober and the corresponding drunk persons created in Electronics Laboratory Physics Department University of Patras, Greece, is provided and the experimental procedure carried out toward the completion of this database (http://www. physics.upatras.gr/sober/) is described.

The methods for drunk identification were developed independently and the obtained features are different. It is important, in a future work the correlation between these features as far as their common information is concerned to be analyzed so that an optimal identification procedure using all this information can be devised (information fusion).

The final goal of the exposed material is to achieve a drunk person identification using only its thermal images without the need of comparisons with the corresponding images obtained when the person was sober. This is achieved by most methods presented here and constitutes a significant challenge toward building a commercial product. Such a commercial product could scan the face of a person and in case he is identified as drunk, the system will prevent him of being engaged into critical procedures (driving or operating specialized infrastructure).
