Toyota Motor Corp. said Tuesday it plans to equip vehicles with a safety feature to make sure drivers aren't asleep at the wheel or looking away from the road.

The new feature uses a driver-monitoring camera and image-processing computer to determine the position of the driver's upper and lower eyelids, the company said.

If the vehicle's pre-crash safety system determines that the driver's eyes are not properly open — or they are not facing forward — and a collision is imminent, it sounds an early warning to the driver.

Toyota said the eye-monitoring system, billed as a world first, would be offered in vehicle models for launch in Japan in the near future.

Toyota said in a statement monitoring the driver's condition is "vital" to vehicle safety.

"Driver condition is seen as a key factor in traffic safety, with driver error being the main cause of traffic accidents," the company said, citing a 2005 report by Japan's Institute for Traffic Accident Research and Data Analysis.

Safety features in the automotive industry are becoming increasingly automated as manufacturers look to reduce accidents caused by driver error. Many car manufacturers already include collision detection technology and some have implemented advanced indicators like blind-spot sensors that flash a light to let the driver know when a vehicle enters their blind spot.

Chris Urmson, the director of technology for Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University's entry in a U.S. government-sponsored robot car race, told CBC News earlier this month that automation was the way of the future.

"It's going to be phased in gradually," said Urmson, whose team's GM SUV won the the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency Urban Challenge. "But we expect a fully autonomous, self-driving car to be on the road in the next decade."