This paper presents a real-time method based on various entropy and complexity measures for detection and identification of driving fatigue from recorded electroencephalogram (EEG), electromyogram, and electrooculogram signals. The complexity features were used to distinguish whether the subjects are experienced drivers by calculating the Lempel-Ziv complexity of EEG approximate entropy (ApEn). Different threshold values can be set for the two kinds of drivers individually. The entropy-based features, namely, the wavelet entropy (WE), the peak-to-peak value of ApEn (PP-ApEn), and the peak-to-peak value of sample entropy (PP-SampEn), were extracted from the collected signals to estimate the driving fatigue stages. We proposed WE in a sliding window (WES), PP-ApEn in a sliding window (PP-ApEnS), and PP-SampEn in a sliding window (PP-SampEnS) for real-time analysis of driver fatigue. The real-time features obtained by WE, PP-ApEn, and PP-SampEn with sliding window were applied to artificial neural network for training and testing the system, which gives four situations for the fatigue level of the subjects, namely, normal state, mild fatigue, mood swing, and excessive fatigue. Then, the driver fatigue level can be determined in real time. The accuracy of estimation is about 96.5%-99.5%. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to present the performance of the neural network classifier. The area under the ROC curve is 0.9931. The results show that the developed method is valuable for the application of avoiding some traffic accidents caused by driver's fatigue.

Driver distraction diverting drivers’ attention to unrelated tasks and decreasing the ability to control vehicles, has aroused widespread concern about driving safety. Previous studies have found that driving performance decreases after distraction and have used vehicle behavioral features to detect distraction. But how brain activity changes while distraction remains unknown. Electroencephalography (EEG), a reliable indicator of brain activities has been widely employed in many fields. However, challenges still exist in mining the distraction information of EEG in realistic driving scenarios with uncertain information. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on Multi-scale entropy (MSE) in a sliding window and Bidirectional Long Short-term Memory Network (BiLSTM) to explore the distraction information of EEG to detect driver distraction based on multi-modality signals in real traffic. Firstly, MSE with sliding window is implemented to extract the EEG features to determine the distraction position. Statistical analysis of vehicle behavioral data is then performed to validate driving performance indeed changes around distraction position. Finally, we use BiLSTM to detect driver distraction with MSE and other traditional features. Our results show that MSE notably decreases after distraction. Consistent with the result of MSE, driving performance significantly deviates from the normal state after distraction. Besides, BiLSTM performance of MSE outperforms other entropy-based methods and is better than behavioral features. Additionally, the accuracy is improved again after adding MSE feature to behavioral features with a 3% increasement. The proposed framework is useful for mining brain activity information and driver distraction detection applications in realistic driving scenarios.

With the continuous improvement of automated vehicles, researchers have found that automated driving is more likely to cause passive fatigue. To explore the impact of automation and scenario complexity on the passive fatigue of a driver, we collected electroencephalography (EEG), detection-response task (DRT) performance, and the subjective report scores of 48 drivers. We found that in automated driving under monotonic conditions, after 40 min, the alpha power of the driver’s EEG indicators increased significantly, the accuracy of the detection reaction task decreased, and the reaction time became slower. The receiver characteristic curve was used to calculate the critical threshold of the alpha power during passive fatigue. The determination of the threshold further clarifies the occurrence time and physiological characteristics of passive fatigue and improves the passive fatigue theory.