An Effective Hybrid Model for EEG-Based Drowsiness Detection

Abstract

Early detection of driver drowsiness and the development of a functioning driver alertness system may support the prevention of numerous vehicular accidents worldwide. Wearable sensors and camera-based systems are generally employed in the driver drowsiness detection. Electroencephalogram (or EEG) is considered another effective option for the driver drowsiness detection. Various EEG-based drowsiness detection systems have been proposed to date. In this paper, EEG signals are also used for the detection of drowsiness, with the proposed method being composed of three main building blocks. Both raw EEG signals and their corresponding spectrograms are used in the proposed building blocks. In the first building block, while energy distribution and zero-crossing distribution features are calculated from the raw EEG signals, spectral entropy and instantaneous frequency features are extracted from the EEG spectrogram images. In the second building block, deep feature extraction is employed directly on the EEG spectrogram images using pre-trained AlexNet and VGGNet. In the third building block, the tunable Q-factor wavelet transform (TQWT) is used to decompose the EEG signals into related sub-bands. The spectrogram images of the obtained sub-bands and statistical features, such as mean and standard deviation of the sub-bands’ instantaneous frequencies, are then calculated. Each feature group from each building block is fed to a long-short term memory (LSTM) network for the purposes of classification. The obtained results from the LSTM networks are then fused with a majority voting layer. The MIT-BIH Polysomnographic database was used in the experimental works. The evaluation of the proposed method was carried out with ten-fold cross validation test and the average accuracy represented accordingly. The obtained average accuracy score was 94.31%. The obtained result was also compared with other results to be found in the literature. The comparison shows that the proposed method’s achievement was found to be better than the compared results.