Open Access Research Article

Multimodality Inferring of Human Cognitive States Based on Integration of Neuro-Fuzzy Network and Information Fusion Techniques

G Yang1, Y Lin2* and P Bhattacharya3

Author Affiliations

1 College of Information Engineering, Central University for Nationalities, Beijing 100081, China

2 Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA

3 Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada, H3G 1M8

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EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2008, 2008:371621  doi:10.1155/2008/371621


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2008/1/371621


Received: 11 December 2006
Revisions received: 25 April 2007
Accepted: 9 August 2007
Published: 22 August 2007

© 2008 The Author(s).

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

To achieve an effective and safe operation on the machine system where the human interacts with the machine mutually, there is a need for the machine to understand the human state, especially cognitive state, when the human's operation task demands an intensive cognitive activity. Due to a well-known fact with the human being, a highly uncertain cognitive state and behavior as well as expressions or cues, the recent trend to infer the human state is to consider multimodality features of the human operator. In this paper, we present a method for multimodality inferring of human cognitive states by integrating neuro-fuzzy network and information fusion techniques. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, we take the driver fatigue detection as an example. The proposed method has, in particular, the following new features. First, human expressions are classified into four categories: (i) casual or contextual feature, (ii) contact feature, (iii) contactless feature, and (iv) performance feature. Second, the fuzzy neural network technique, in particular Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) model, is employed to cope with uncertain behaviors. Third, the sensor fusion technique, in particular ordered weighted aggregation (OWA), is integrated with the TSK model in such a way that cues are taken as inputs to the TSK model, and then the outputs of the TSK are fused by the OWA which gives outputs corresponding to particular cognitive states under interest (e.g., fatigue). We call this method TSK-OWA. Validation of the TSK-OWA, performed in the Northeastern University vehicle drive simulator, has shown that the proposed method is promising to be a general tool for human cognitive state inferring and a special tool for the driver fatigue detection.

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