ECG based driver drowsiness detection using scalograms and convolutional neural networks

Driving while drowsy is one of the significant causes of road accidents, and detection of drowsiness of drivers is necessary to minimize such accidents. There are many methods proposed for drowsiness detection. In this paper, we present the details of a drowsiness detection system using deep learning techniques with ECG as its input. Continuous wavelet transforms (CWT) are applied on the input signal, segmented to 1-minute duration, and then it is converted into scalogram images to be fed as input to deep neural networks (DNN). We use pre-trained transfer learning models, AlexNet, ResNet-50, and VGG-19 for this work. The best results were obtained for Reset-50 with an accuracy of 88.31% without dropping the final layers, which is an improvement of 4.5% over the spectrogram-based implementation. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of wavelet-based features, and we note that the time-frequency domain features outperform. To check the robustness of the net-work, a second model is implemented by dropping the final layers, and the validation accuracy of AlexNet is 51.5%, ResNet-50 is 67.2%, and VGG-19 is 81.8%.