Vigilance detection based on sparse representation of EEG

Electroencephalogram (EEG) based vigilance detection of those people who engage in long time attention demanding tasks such as monotonous monitoring or driving is a key field in the research of brain-computer interface (BCI). However, robust detection of human vigilance from EEG is very difficult due to the low SNR nature of EEG signals. Recently, compressive sensing and sparse representation become successful tools in the fields of signal reconstruction and machine learning. In this paper, we propose to use the sparse representation of EEG to the vigilance detection problem. We first use continuous wavelet transform to extract the rhythm features of EEG data, and then employ the sparse representation method to the wavelet transform coefficients. We collect five subjects´ EEG recordings in a simulation driving environment and apply the proposed method to detect the vigilance of the subjects. The experimental results show that the algorithm framework proposed in this paper can successfully estimate driver´s vigilance with the average accuracy about 94.22 %. We also compare our algorithm framework with other vigilance estimation methods using different feature extraction and classifier selection approaches, the result shows that the proposed method has obvious advantages in the classification accuracy.