EOG-based drowsiness detection using convolutional neural networks

This study provides a new application of convolutional neural networks for drowsiness detection based on electrooculography (EOG) signals. Drowsiness is charged to be one of the major causes of traffic accidents. Such application is helpful to reduce losses of casualty and property. Most attempts at drowsiness detection based on EOG involve a feature extraction step, which is accounted as time-consuming task, and it is difficult to extract effective features. In this paper, an unsupervised learning is proposed to estimate driver fatigue based on EOG. A convolutional neural network with a linear regression layer is applied to EOG signals in order to avoid using of manual features. With a postprocessing step of linear dynamic system (LDS), we are able to capture the physiological status shifting. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated by the correlation coefficients between the final outputs and the local error rates of the subjects. Compared with the results of a manual ad-hoc feature extraction approach, our method is proven to be effective for drowsiness detection.