Automated detection of driver fatigue from electroencephalography through wavelet-based connectivity

Background: Mental fatigue is one of the most causes of road accidents. Identification of biological tools and methods such as electroencephalogram (EEG) are invaluable to detect them at early stage in hazard situations. Methods: In this paper, an expert automatic method based on brain region connectivity for detecting fatigue is proposed. The recorded general data during driving in both fatigue (the last five minutes) and alert (at the beginning of driving) states are used in analyzing the method. In this process, the EEG data during continuous driving in one to two hours are noted. The new feature of Gaussian Copula Mutual Information (GCMI) based on wavelet coefficients is calculated to detect brain region connectivity. Classification for each subject is then done through selected optimal features using the support vector machine (SVM) with linear kernel. Results: The designed technique can classify trials with 98.1% accuracy. The most significant contributions to the selected features are the wavelet coefficients details 1-2 (corresponding to the Beta and Gamma frequency bands) in the central and temporal regions. In this paper, a new algorithm for channel selection is introduced that has been able to achieve 97.2% efficiency by selecting eight channels from 30 recorded channels. Conclusion: The obtained results from the classification are compared with other methods, and it is proved that the proposed method accuracy is higher from others at a significant level. The technique is completely automatic, while the calculation load could be reduced remarkably through selecting the optimal channels implementing in real-time systems. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Nalecz Institute of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences.