Correlation of P300 ERPs with visual stimuli and its application to vigilance detection

Vigilance or sustained attention is defined as the ability to maintain concentrated attention over prolonged time periods. It is an important aspect in industries such as aerospace and nuclear power, which involve tremendous man-machine interaction and where safety of any component/system or environment as a whole is extremely crucial. Many methods for vigilance detection, based on biological and behavioral characteristics, have been proposed in the literature. Nevertheless, the existing methods are associated with high time complexity, unhandy devices and incur huge equipment overhead. This paper aims to pave an alternative solution to the existing techniques using brain computing interface (BCI). EEG device being a non-invasive BCI technique is popular in many applications. In this work, we have utilized P300 component of ERPs of EEG signal for vigilance detection task as it can be detected fast and accurately. Through this work, we aim to establish the correlation between P300 ERP and vigilance. We have performed a number of experiments to substantiate the correctness of our proposal and have also proposed an approach to measure the vigilance level.