EEG-Based Drowsiness Estimation for Driving Safety Using Deep Q-Learning

Fatigue is the most vital factor of road fatalities, and one manifestation of fatigue during driving is drowsiness. In this paper, we propose using deep Q-learning to study the correlation between drowsiness and driving performance. This study is carried out by analyzing an electroencephalogram (EEG) dataset captured during a simulated endurance driving test. Driving safety research using EEG data represents an important brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigm from an application perspective. To formulate the drowsiness estimation problem as an optimization of a Q-learning task, we adapt the terminologies in the driving test to fit the reinforcement learning framework. Based on that, a deep Q-network (DQN) is tailored by referring to the latest DQN technologies. The designed network merits the characteristics of the EEG data and can generate actions to indirectly estimate drowsiness. The results show that the trained model can trace the variations of mind state in a satisfactory way against the testing EEG data, which confirms the feasibility and practicability of this new computation paradigm. By comparison, it also reveals that our method outperforms the supervised learning counterpart and is superior for real applications. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce the deep reinforcement learning method to this BCI scenario, and our method can potentially be generalized to other BCI cases.