Human-Centric Spatial Cognition Detecting System Based on Drivers’ Electroencephalogram Signals for Autonomous Driving

Existing autonomous driving systems face challenges in accurately capturing drivers’ cognitive states, often resulting in decisions misaligned with drivers’ intentions. To address this limitation, this study introduces a pioneering human-centric spatial cognition detecting system based on drivers’ electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Unlike conventional EEG-based systems that focus on intention recognition or hazard perception, the proposed system can further extract drivers’ spatial cognition across two dimensions: relative distance and relative orientation. It consists of two components: EEG signal preprocessing and spatial cognition decoding, enabling the autonomous driving system to make more contextually aligned decisions regarding the targets drivers focus on. To enhance the detection accuracy of drivers’ spatial cognition, we designed a novel EEG signal decoding method called a Dual-Time-Feature Network (DTFNet). This approach integrates coarse-grained and fine-grained temporal features of EEG signals across different scales and incorporates a Squeeze-and-Excitation module to evaluate the importance of electrodes. The DTFNet outperforms existing methods, achieving 65.67% and 50.65% accuracy in three-class tasks and 84.46% and 70.50% in binary tasks. Furthermore, we investigated the temporal dynamics of drivers’ spatial cognition and observed that drivers’ perception of relative distance occurs slightly later than their perception of relative orientation, providing valuable insights into the temporal aspects of cognitive processing.