To solve the reduction of eye state recognition accuracy caused by com plex illumination,rotation of the head and wearing glasses,this paper presents an innovative eye state recognition alg orithm based on infrared image and morphology.Firstly,an active infrared light source with wavelength of 850nm an d a narrow band-pass optical filter placed in front of the camera are used to colle ct eye images.Then,the feature descriptor of eye contour and the direction c hain code of eye skeleton image are extracted to detect the driver eye state.The image credibility mechanism is introduced in this method.The eye state is divided into three categories:eye opening,eye cl osure and untrusted states,which greatly reduces the false alarm rate of the algorithm in harsh environment.The experim ent results show that the algorithm has a high robustness to the complex illumination,the rotation of the head,wearing glas ses,etc.In the credible eye images set, the recognition accuracies of eye opening and eye closure are up to 95.21% and 92.03%,respectively,which are higher than other commonly used methods.Meanwhile,it can cope with more than 200eye images per second,so it meets the real-time requirements in the real driving environm ent.