Driver Distraction Detection Using Bidirectional Long Short-Term Network Based on Multiscale Entropy of EEG

Driver distraction diverting drivers’ attention to unrelated tasks and decreasing the ability to control vehicles, has aroused widespread concern about driving safety. Previous studies have found that driving performance decreases after distraction and have used vehicle behavioral features to detect distraction. But how brain activity changes while distraction remains unknown. Electroencephalography (EEG), a reliable indicator of brain activities has been widely employed in many fields. However, challenges still exist in mining the distraction information of EEG in realistic driving scenarios with uncertain information. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on Multi-scale entropy (MSE) in a sliding window and Bidirectional Long Short-term Memory Network (BiLSTM) to explore the distraction information of EEG to detect driver distraction based on multi-modality signals in real traffic. Firstly, MSE with sliding window is implemented to extract the EEG features to determine the distraction position. Statistical analysis of vehicle behavioral data is then performed to validate driving performance indeed changes around distraction position. Finally, we use BiLSTM to detect driver distraction with MSE and other traditional features. Our results show that MSE notably decreases after distraction. Consistent with the result of MSE, driving performance significantly deviates from the normal state after distraction. Besides, BiLSTM performance of MSE outperforms other entropy-based methods and is better than behavioral features. Additionally, the accuracy is improved again after adding MSE feature to behavioral features with a 3% increasement. The proposed framework is useful for mining brain activity information and driver distraction detection applications in realistic driving scenarios.