Introducing a Novel Fast Neighbourhood Component Analysis–Deep Neural Network Model for Enhanced Driver Drowsiness Detection

Driver fatigue is a key factor in road accidents worldwide, requiring effective real-time detection mechanisms. Traditional deep neural network (DNN)-based solutions have shown promising results in detecting drowsiness; however, they are often less suitable for real-time applications due to their high computational complexity, risk of overfitting, and reliance on large datasets. Hence, this paper introduces an innovative approach that integrates fast neighbourhood component analysis (FNCA) with a deep neural network (DNN) to enhance the detection of driver drowsiness using electroencephalogram (EEG) data. FNCA is employed to optimize feature representation, effectively highlighting critical features for drowsiness detection, which are then analysed using a DNN to achieve high accuracy in recognizing signs of driver fatigue. Our model has been evaluated on the SEED-VIG dataset and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy: 94.29% when trained on 12 subjects and 90.386% with 21 subjects, surpassing existing methods such as TSception, ConvNeXt LMDA-Net, and CNN + LSTM.