Driver drowsiness and loss of vigilance are a major cause of road accidents. Monitoring physiological signals while driving provides the possibility of detecting and warning of drowsiness and fatigue. The aim of this paper is to maximize the amount of drowsiness-related information extracted from a set of electroencephalogram (EEG), electrooculogram (EOG), and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals during a simulation driving test. Specifically, we develop an efficient fuzzy mutual-information (MI)- based wavelet packet transform (FMIWPT) feature-extraction method for classifying the driver drowsiness state into one of predefined drowsiness levels. The proposed method estimates the required MI using a novel approach based on fuzzy memberships providing an accurate-information content-estimation measure. The quality of the extracted features was assessed on datasets collected from 31 drivers on a simulation test. The experimental results proved the significance of FMIWPT in extracting features that highly correlate with the different drowsiness levels achieving a classification accuracy of 95%-97% on an average across all subjects.

Road-boundary detection is an integral and important function in advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous vehicle navigation systems. A prominent feature of roads in urban, semi-urban, and similar environments, such as in theme parks, campus sites, industrial estates, science parks, and the like, is curbs on either side defining the road's boundary. Although vision is the most common and popular sensing modality used by researchers and automotive manufacturers for road-lane detection, it can pose formidable challenges in detecting road curbs under poor illumination, bad weather, and complex driving environments. This paper proposes a novel method based on extended Kalman filtering for fast detection and tracking of road curbs using successive range/bearing readings obtained from a scanning two-dimensional ladar measurement system. As compared with millimeter wave radar methods reported in the literature, the proposed technique is simpler and computationally more efficient. This is the first of its kind reported in the literature. Qualitative experimental results are presented from the application of the technique to a campus site environment to demonstrate the viability, effectiveness, and robustness.

The performance of intelligent electromyogram (EMG)-driven prostheses, functioning as artificial alternatives to missing limbs, is influenced by several dynamic factors including: electrode position shift, varying muscle contraction level, forearm orientation, and limb position. The impact of these factors on EMG pattern recognition has been previously studied in isolation, with the combined effect of these factors being understudied. However, it is likely that a combination of these factors influences the accuracy. We investigated the combined effect of two dynamic factors, namely, forearm orientation and muscle contraction levels, on the generalizability of the EMG pattern recognition. A number of recent time- and frequency-domain EMG features were utilized to study the EMG classification accuracy. Twelve intact-limbed and one bilateral transradial (below-elbow) amputee subject were recruited. They performed six classes of wrist and hand movements at three muscular contraction levels with three forearm orientations (nine conditions). Results indicate that a classifier trained by features that quantify the angle, rather than amplitude, of the muscle activation patterns perform better than other feature sets across different contraction levels and forearm orientations. In addition, a classifier trained with the EMG signals collected at multiple forearm orientations with medium muscular contractions can generalize well and achieve classification accuracies of up to 91%. Furthermore, inclusion of an accelerometer to monitor wrist movement further improved the EMG classification accuracy. The results indicate that the proposed methodology has the potential to improve robustness of myoelectric pattern recognition