A Lightweight Subject-adaptive EEG Network for Driver Drowsiness Detection

Qien Hou*
Huaibei Vocational and Technical College, Huaibei 235000, China
*Corresponding email: houqien@163.com
https://doi.org/10.71052/srb2024/DGII1415

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based driver-drowsiness detection is hindered by cross-subject variability and the resource cost of multi-channel models. This article presents Lite dynamic vision with explicit-adaptive implicit matching knowledge distillation (Lite-DV-EAIM-KD), a lightweight, subject-adaptive, and interpretable framework for binary drowsiness recognition. Thirty-channel EEG is decomposed into six wavelet components and represented as raw and Euclidean-aligned views. Each view employs a shared convolutional trunk with component-specific normalization, temporal attention, and component attention. A larger dual-view teacher provides offline supervision during unlabeled target-subject adaptation, and only the compact two-view student is retained for inference. Leave-one-subject-out experiments on 2,022 balanced three-second EEG epochs from 11 subjects yield 83.400% mean accuracy, 83.330% macro-average F1 score (macro-F1), and 89.580% mean area under the curve (AUC). Compared with the non-distilled shared-component student, the proposed method gains 4.37 percentage points in accuracy while retaining 4,112 deployed parameters. It reduces parameters by 82.600% and median batch-one graphics processing unit (GPU) latency by 74.900% relative to the teacher. Attribution-guided occlusion further supports the faithfulness of the learned frequency and channel evidence. These results show that compact multi-component EEG modeling can preserve cross-subject discrimination when coupled with unlabeled target adaptation and explicit decision evidence.

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Hou, Q. (2026) A Lightweight Subject-adaptive EEG Network for Driver Drowsiness Detection. Scientific Research Bulletin, 3(2), 90-99. https://doi.org/10.71052/srb2024/DGII1415

Published

10/08/2026