The growing number of traffic accidents in recent years has become a serious concern to society. Accidents caused by driver's drowsiness behind the steering wheel have a high fatality rate because of the marked decline in the driver's abilities of perception, recognition, and vehicle control abilities while sleepy. Preventing such accidents caused by drowsiness is highly desirable but requires techniques for continuously detecting, estimating, and predicting the level of alertness of drivers and delivering effective feedbacks to maintain their maximum performance. This paper proposes an EEG-based drowsiness estimation system that combines electroencephalogram (EEG) log subband power spectrum, correlation analysis, principal component analysis, and linear regression models to indirectly estimate driver's drowsiness level in a virtual-reality-based driving simulator. Our results demonstrated that it is feasible to accurately estimate quantitatively driving performance, expressed as deviation between the center of the vehicle and the center of the cruising lane, in a realistic driving simulator

Preventing accidents caused by drowsiness has become a major focus of active safety driving in recent years. It requires an optimal technique to continuously detect drivers' cognitive state related to abilities in perception, recognition, and vehicle control in (near-) real-time. The major challenges in developing such a system include: 1) the lack of significant index for detecting drowsiness and 2) complicated and pervasive noise interferences in a realistic and dynamic driving environment. In this paper, we develop a drowsiness-estimation system based on electroencephalogram (EEG) by combining independent component analysis (ICA), power-spectrum analysis, correlation evaluations, and linear regression model to estimate a driver's cognitive state when he/she drives a car in a virtual reality (VR)-based dynamic simulator. The driving error is defined as deviations between the center of the vehicle and the center of the cruising lane in the lane-keeping driving task. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of quantitatively estimating drowsiness level using ICA-based multistream EEG spectra. The proposed ICA-based method applied to power spectrum of ICA components can successfully (1) remove most of EEG artifacts, (2) suggest an optimal montage to place EEG electrodes, and estimate the driver's drowsiness fluctuation indexed by the driving performance measure. Finally, we present a benchmark study in which the accuracy of ICA-component-based alertness estimates compares favorably to scalp-EEG based.

Preventing accidents caused by drowsiness behind the steering wheel is highly desirable but requires techniques for continuously estimating driver's abilities of perception, recognition and vehicle control abilities. This paper proposes methods for drowsiness estimation that combine the electroencephalogram (EEG) log subband power spectrum, correlation analysis, principal component analysis, and linear regression models to indirectly estimate driver's drowsiness level in a virtual-reality-based driving simulator. Results show that it is feasible to quantitatively monitor driver's alertness with concurrent changes in driving performance in a realistic driving simulator.

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