Bidirectional Temporal Dynamics Modeling for EEG-based Driving Fatigue Recognition

Abstract

Driving fatigue is a major contributor to traffic accidents and poses a serious threat to road safety. Electroencephalography (EEG) provides a direct measurement of neural activity, yet EEG-based fatigue recognition is hindered by strong non-stationarity and asymmetric neural dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose DeltaGateNet, a novel framework that explicitly captures Bidirectional temporal dynamics for EEG-based driving fatigue recognition. Our key idea is to introduce a Bidirectional Delta module that decomposes first-order temporal differences into positive and negative components, enabling explicit modeling of asymmetric neural activation and suppression patterns. Furthermore, we design a Gated Temporal Convolution module to capture long-term temporal dependencies for each EEG channel using depthwise temporal convolutions and residual learning, preserving channel-wise specificity while enhancing temporal representation robustness. Extensive experiments conducted under both intra-subject and inter-subject evaluation settings on the public SEED-VIG and SADT driving fatigue datasets demonstrate that DeltaGateNet consistently outperforms existing methods. On SEED-VIG, DeltaGateNet achieves an intra-subject accuracy of 81.89% and an inter-subject accuracy of 55.55%. On the balanced SADT 2022 dataset, it attains intra-subject and inter-subject accuracies of 96.81% and 83.21%, respectively, while on the unbalanced SADT 2952 dataset, it achieves 96.84% intra-subject and 84.49% inter-subject accuracy. These results indicate that explicitly modeling Bidirectional temporal dynamics yields robust and generalizable performance under varying subject and class-distribution conditions.