TFAC-Net: A Temporal-Frequential Attentional Convolutional Network for Driver Drowsiness Recognition with Single-Channel EEG

Fatigue driving is a significant cause of road traffic accidents and associated casualties. Automatic assessment of driver drowsiness by monitoring electroencephalography (EEG) signals offer a more objective way to improve driving safety. However, most existing measures are based on multi-channel EEG signals, which are more difficult to apply in practical scenarios as it usually lacks better portability and comfort. In addition, due to the relatively parsimonious and non-stationary characteristics, it is still challenging to effectively accomplish drowsiness recognition by exploiting single-channel EEG signals alone. To this end, we propose a novel temporal-frequential attentional convolutional neural network (TFAC-Net) to take full advantage of spectral-temporal features for single-channel EEG driver drowsiness recognition. Specifically, to capture the potentially valuable information contained in single-channel EEG, the continuous wavelet transform is first employed to generate a corresponding spectral-temporal representation. Then, the temporal-frequential attention mechanism is adopted to reveal critical time-frequency regions in terms of the driver’s mental state. Finally, an adaptive feature fusion module is considered to recalibrate and integrate the most relevant feature channels for final prediction. Extensive experimental results on a widely used public EEG driving dataset demonstrate that the TFAC-Net approach is superior to the state-of-the-art methods, and could discover some discriminative temporal-frequential regions. Moreover, this study also sheds light on the development of portable EEG devices and practical driver drowsiness recognition.