Car Racing Driver Distraction Detection Using Brain EEG
Mahsa Salehi Geoffrey Mackellar
Department of Computing and Emotiv Research Inc
Information Systems Sydney, Australia
The University of Melbourne geoff@emotiv.com
Victoria 3010, Australia
salehim@unimelb.edu.au
ABSTRACT
Monitoring driver attention has a direct effect on decreas-
ing injury/fatality rates. Hence, detecting episodes of driver
distraction is fundamental in reducing car crashes. This is
particularly significant in car racing environments where re-
action times are short, and distraction leads to a reduction
in drivers performance during a race. Considering the lim-
itations of video/speech processing approaches in car rac-
ing conditions (wearing fire protective suits and helmets,
noisy environments), in this paper we focus on the feasibility
of Brain Computer Interface (BCI) approaches, by using a
commercial headset which generates brain EEG signals and
gyroscope data wirelessly. Our experimental results show
the combination of EEG and gyroscope data can lead to
a highly accurate distraction detection framework. In addi-
tion, our proposed framework is scalable and can potentially
be parallelized in order to reduce response times and moni-
tor racing drivers in real-time.
Keywords
Car Racing, Brain Computer Interface, Electroencephalog-
raphy (EEG) Signal, Driver Distraction, Data Stream Clas-
sification, Real-time Response
1. INTRODUCTION
Based on research by the Alberta Transportation annual
report in 2011 [1], distracted drivers are 3 times more likely
to be in a crash than attentive drivers [2]. This suggests
that a considerable number of road fatalities are attributable
to driver inattention. In terms of car-racing, it is even more
important to detect driver distraction episodes. First, if
drivers are distracted their performance is likely to decrease.
Second, driver distraction might lead to catastrophic crashes
at high speeds. Furthermore, tracking distraction informa-
tion for a driver can be used to further train the driver and
improve his/her driving skills.
While researchers have mostly considered the optimal per-
formance of car operation in racing, monitoring the drivers
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Christopher Leckie
Department of Computing and
Information Systems
The University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010, Australia
caleckie@unimelb.edu.au
state during car racing has received little attention. In or-
der to detect a drivers mental state, such as distraction,
drowsiness or emotional states, a variety of video process-
ing (e.g., eye tracking) and speech processing approaches
have been proposed. However, in car racing environments
drivers should wear fire protective suits and helmets which
cover their face and head, hence passive video processing
approaches are not practical in such situations. Due to the
high level of background noise in the environment, speech
processing techniques become ineffective as well. As a result,
in this paper we investigate the feasibility of a BCI approach
to detect distraction episodes of drivers in car racing envi-
ronments. We propose analyzing the brain EEG signals of
a driver to infer episodes of distraction. We also investi-
gate how the movement data of a drivers head can further
help to detect distraction in drivers. We use a commercial
headset which can be put into a drivers helmet to collect
EEG signals from the drivers brain and gyroscope data from
the drivers head wirelessly. We categorize the distraction
scenarios in car racing into three main classes and propose
scalable data mining algorithms to detect them. To the
best of our knowledge, none of the previous approaches de-
tect episodes of car racing driver distraction using electrical
brain activity and gyroscope data.
2. RELATED WORK
In order to detect driver distraction, researchers have tra-
ditionally focused on video processing techniques [14] and
tracking eye movement [15]. However, these approaches can
not be used in car racing where drivers faces are covered by a
helmet or mask, unless the eye cameras are integrated into
the equipment, which has not been studied to our knowl-
edge.
More recently, researchers have focused on monitoring the
EEG signals of a drivers brain to find patterns of distrac-
tion. In this sense, Lin et al. [9] used a 32-channel EEG
system from Neuroscan Compumedics Ltd. to investigate
driver cognition. Later, Wang et al. [13] used the same
system while considering two types of distractions in their
experiments, and achieved high detection accuracy using dif-
ferent machine learning techniques. In [8], 30 electrodes are
used to study the dual task of driver performance, and they
found an increase in the theta band power of EEG signals
in the frontal areas of the brain during distraction. In addi-
tion, the authors in [10] also show an increase in the theta
band by studying the effects of iPod usage and text messag-
ing on driver distraction. In [11], the effect of alpha spindle
in EEG on attention was studied using 32 electrodes from
ActiCap, Brain Products GmbH. Finally in a recent study,
the authors in [12] found patterns of specific driver distrac-
tions, i.e., the beginning and ending of map reviewing, using
a Neuroscan system including 36 EEG channels.
None of the above EEG-based approaches have consid-
ered driver distraction detection in car racing environments.
However, Katsis et al. [7] have recently proposed a system
to detect the emotional state of drivers in car racing. They
use 16 facial EMGs, EDR, ECG and driver respiration data
to detect stress level of drivers in car racing with 76.3% ac-
curacy, whereas in this paper our focus is on analyzing EEG
and head motion signals to detect distraction episodes of
drivers in car racing.
3. OUR METHODOLOGY
We have used the Emotiv EPOC headset1 to record EEG
signals. This wireless lightweight headset can be adapted
to fit into the drivers helmet and provide monitoring of 14
channel positions of a drivers brain in real-time. The EPOC
headset and its channel positions on the scalp are shown in
Fig. 1a-b. In addition, the headset has a 2-D gyroscope to
measure head movement.
In our framework, the driver distraction scenarios in car
racing are categorized into three main classes: 1) When a
driver is communicating to someone in the car (e.g., the
navigator), 2) When a driver is communicating to someone
remotely (e.g., the support team via radio) and 3) Problem
solving activities (e.g., planning fuel consumption, strategy
and tactics).
In this section, we explain our methodology to extract
features from EEG signals. Thereafter we propose two ap-
proaches to detect the episodes of distraction. First, a shared
mixture classifier is proposed. Second, a more scalable algo-
rithm is proposed by using an ensemble based approach. In
order to show the robustness of our proposed methods, we
also use a boosting algorithm and detect the distraction of
drivers.
Feature Extraction The signals are generated at 128Hz
and data was band-pass filtered at 4-40Hz to reduce ocular
artifacts, epoched into trailing 2 second windows (updated
at 0.5s intervals) and then FFT was applied. Features were
selected based on the usual frequency bands (theta, alpha,
low beta, high beta, gamma) and the average power per
band was recorded for each sensor. In addition the peak
power and peak frequency in each band were recorded at
each sensor. Additional features were generated based on
accumulated power in regions such as left and right frontal
regions, left and right hemispheres, left and right tempo-
ral/parietal and occipital power within each specified band,
and by accumulating EEP power over the main process-
ing bands (beta and gamma). This results in 266 different
features. Additionally, there is another feature extracted
from the gyroscope, indicating the number of times the user
looked around in a 15 seconds window.
Shared Mixture Classifier In order to select the most
effective features from the 267 features, we first use canonical
variate analysis [4], which produces vectors in the direction
of greatest variance between each class and the remaining
data. We select the features by sorting the features using
the magnitude of each projection coefficient. Thereafter,
we use a shared mixture classifier (SMC) [6], allowing all
1
http://www.emotiv.com/epoc.php
(a) (b)
Figure 1: EPOC (a) Headset, (b) 14-Channels
of the mixture components to contribute to the model. In
this model each mixture has its own set of likelihoods for
belonging to each output class. Here we used 5 mixture
components, selected on the basis of residual performance
improvement to avoid over training.
Random Forest In high dimensional, high volume data
sets, random forests (RFs) [3] can be used for both feature
selection and classification. In addition, since the trees in
the RF model are independent from each other, each tree
can be put on different nodes. As a result of such model-
ing, distraction detection can be parallelized. Hence, this
approach is highly scalable in terms of time complexity and
is well suited to our real-time application. Therefore, in
this paper the RF algorithm is used to first select the most
important features and then to detect distraction episodes.
AdaBoost Besides using a bagging approach, we used
another ensemble technique, AdaBoost [5], to ensure the ro-
bustness of our model. In AdaBoost, like other ensemble
techniques, a number of classifiers are built. In each round
of building the classifier, the misclassified observations gain
higher weights for the next round to have a higher proba-
bility to participate in building the next classifier. We build
a decision tree using a random subset of features in each
round of the algorithm in this paper. This approach is also
scalable and is well suited to our problem.
4. EVALUATION
In this section, we apply the methodology that is described
in the previous section in order to classify data streams
into attention/distraction. We first describe our data set
and then the performance measures we used to evaluate
our methodology. All the implementations are in Matlab
R2014b and all experiments were done on a Core i7-2600
CPU 3.40GHz running Windows 7. We have used the im-
plementation of Breimans random forest algorithm [3] and
AdaBoost [5] in Matlab R2014b.
Data Set There were 18 subjects who attended a driving
simulation which took about 40 minutes each. We asked the
subjects to blink a few times before starting the experiment.
The rationale with the repeated blinks is to make sure there
are reference marks aligning the eye tracker, video and EEG
channels to make sure we align the events correctly. For the
purposes of experiments because of the difficulty of obtaining
actual racing conditions, we have provided more controlled
conditions to normal drivers instead. To do so, for each of
the three distraction categories mentioned earlier, we have
used the following controlled tasks:
1. Communicating to navigator: Talking to passenger
 2.5 3.5
Out-of-Bag Feature Importance

Out-of-Bag Feature Importance

3 AUC
2 90
2.5 OOB Accuracy

Accuracy(%)
1.5 2
80
1 1.5

1
0.5
0.5 70
0 0
0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250
Feature Index Feature Index 60
266 25 20
(a) EEG features (b) EEG+Gyro features
Number of Features

Figure 2: Feature importance using random forests

and OOB error Figure 3: Feature reduction using random forests

73.5 73.5
2. Communicating to the remote support team: Mobile
call, Recording call 73 73

AUC(%)

AUC(%)
3. Problem solving activities: Solving simple mental arith- 72.5 72.5

metic challenges placed on the road, assessed by the

72 72
driving through the chosen answer from a range of al-
ternatives on screen 71.5 71.5
100 200 400 1000 1 5 10
Forest Size Minimum Number data points in Leaf
The resulting data set contains 180,000 records with 267
features. We also recorded the video of the experiments to be (a) (b)
used for labeling the distraction episodes in the data set by
a human expert. A hold out evaluation methodology is used Figure 4: Effect of (a) forest size on AUC, (b) num-
2 ber of data points per tree leaf on AUC
and of subjects are chosen randomly for training purposes
3
and the rest of the subjects are left for evaluation. We have in prediction error if the values of that feature are permuted
rescaled all features in the data set, using zero-mean and across the OOB observations. Fig. 2a-b show the feature
unit-variance. importance for each category. As depicted, the feature im-
Performance Measure The first performance measure portance in both categories are roughly similar and related
is AUC (Area Under Curve) of the ROC curve, which is a to the processing power and peak frequencies in different lo-
curve showing the relationship between false positive rates cations of the brain. In addition, the gyroscope feature in
and true positive rates in our evaluation (testing) set. The the second category (the last bar in the rightmost of Fig. 2b)
output of the classification algorithms is the probability of is the most important feature in this category. Hence, we
being distracted, and each data point on the ROC curve is expect the detection accuracy would increase by using this
related to the threshold of the output probabilities. Hence, feature. Using the feature importance measure can help us
this is the detection accuracy and in this paper we use AUC to select the most important features in the classification
and detection accuracy interchangeably. task.
Since we have used a random forest algorithm in our method- We have selected the features with an OOB feature impor-
ology, the out of bag (OOB) accuracy is the second measure tance measure greater than 1 and 1.5 over the first category
we use for the evaluation. The OOB accuracy is the classifi- of feature sets which results in the top 25 and top 20 features
cation accuracy of observations that are not used in building respectively. Fig. 3 depicts the AUC results and OOB ac-
a tree. In order to compute OOB accuracy for each such ob- curacy results using all features in category one, the top 25
servation, the trees that do not use such observations are features and the top 20 features. We notice a slight decrease
chosen. Hence, it is different to the classification accuracy (0.48%) in the AUC by reducing the number of features to
over the whole training data set. 25. However, if we keep reducing the features to 20, the
AUC drops 1.62%. In addition, the OOB accuracy decrease
4.1 Results and Discussion in the 25 feature set is only 0.07%. If we keep reducing to
The experiments are divided into two main categories. In 20 features, the OOB accuracy drops 1.42%. The results
the first category we consider just the EEG related features suggest that the top 25 features can be considered as a use-
and exclude the gyroscope feature. In this category, the aim ful discriminator set, and we continue our experiments with
is to find out to what extent the brain signals can help us this set of features. In addition to keeping the AUC and
to find the subjects distraction. In the second category, we OOB accuracy roughly the same, selecting the top features
add the gyroscope feature in order to improve the detection reduces the computational complexity and response time,
accuracy. In the random forest algorithm, initially, the forest which is significant in this application. Note that we sim-
size is set to 100, the size of the subset of features is set to ilarly select the features for the second category of feature
50, and the minimum number of data points per tree leaf is sets using Fig. 2b.
set to 1. We now consider the new reduced feature set (top 25) to
investigate the effect of the parameter settings of the random
4.1.1 Feature Selection - RF forest algorithm on AUC in Fig. 4. In Fig. 4a, we increase
We used the training data set and built random forests for the number of ensembles (forest size) in the experiments.
both EEG and EEG+Gyro feature sets. Thereafter, the im- As we construct more trees in the forest, the AUC of the
portance of each feature is calculated based on the increase test set increases. In this figure there is a sudden increase in
 74
81
73.5
80
73
AUC(%)
AUC(%)
79
72.5
78
72
77
71.5
RF Ada SMC RF Ada SMC
(a) EEG features (b) EEG+Gyro features
Figure 5: AUC of different algorithms on both cat-
egories of features
AUC of 0.34% from 100 to 200 ensembles. However, the in-
crease from 400 to 1000 ensembles only gives us a 0.09% rise
in AUC. Fig. 4b shows the effect of the minimum number of
data points per tree leaf. We notice that by increasing this
parameter the AUC slightly increases by roughly 0.08%. As
a result, these two parameter values can be set according
to the response time requirements to get more accurate pre-
dictions. In addition, in our AdaBoost algorithm, the same
feature set and same parameter settings as RF are used.
4.1.2 Feature Selection - SMC
As discussed in the previous section, we use canonical
transformation based on the strongly labeled data to sort
the features using the magnitude of each projection coeffi-
cient. In the experiments we select the top 100 features for
classification by SMC, which decrease the response time.
The summary of AUC results of applying RF, AdaBoost
and SMC on both categories of features are shown in Fig. 5a-
b. In Fig. 5a the AUC measure for all methods are es-
sentially high, which shows the ability of detecting distrac-
tion episodes based on electrical brain signals. In addition,
RF is the most accurate method with an AUC equal to
73.53%. However, as expected, adding the gyroscope feature
increases the detection accuracy in Fig. 5b. While the AUC
in all methods is quite high, RF is again the most accurate
method with an AUC of 81.1%. In addition, all proposed
methods are scalable and can be parallelized, which is an
important advantage in real-time scenarios.
5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper we have investigated the feasibility of detect-
ing car racing driver distraction episodes in real-time using
EEG signals from the drivers brain. We proposed an accu-
rate and scalable methodology to this problem. We used fea-
ture selection approaches which reduce the response time, as
well as three classification algorithms. Our experimental re-
sults on all three methods suggest that the driver distraction
patterns can be detected in real-time using 14 channels of
EEG signals with high accuracy. Moreover, random forests
are the most accurate method with a detection accuracy of
73.53%. We found that the most important features in our
experiments are related to the processing power and peak
frequencies in different locations of the brain. In addition,
we show that by adding gyroscope data to the EEG signals,
the detection accuracy of our framework increased to 81.1%.
Using this methodology, racing car drivers can be trained
to manage their distractions. Moreover, it can provide a
framework to help with better planning of real-time tasks
depending on the drivers distraction state in the race.
In the future, we intend to investigate the planning meth-
ods in combination with the results of this paper to increase
the performance of drivers during races. In addition, due
to the effectiveness of deep learning approaches on complex
signals, we will apply them to find distraction patterns in
EEG signals.
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