MEDS-Net: Meta-Evidential Dual-Stream Network for Multimodal Few-Shot Driver Fatigue Detection

Fatigued driving is a major societal risk factor in the road safety system, affecting the efficiency of the entire transportation network and public safety. Fatigue detection methods based on multimodal physiological signals can objectively reflect a driver’s neurocognitive state, offering higher monitoring reliability. However, existing methods face two main challenges: 1) the high cost of annotating high-quality physiological signals leads to challenges in learning with limited data; and 2) the signal-to-noise ratio of multimodal physiological signals is variable, leading to imbalances in the confidence in the decision between modalities. To address these issues, this article proposes the meta-evidential dual-stream network (MEDS-Net), which integrates a meta-learning framework with evidential deep learning to establish a solution for driver fatigue detection for the first time. Specifically, MEDS-Net employs a dual-stream evidence generation network to extract heterogeneous features from multimodal physiological signals and uses a Dirichlet distribution to quantify cognitive uncertainty for each modality. Additionally, MEDS-Net introduces a meta-learning framework to enhance the model’s ability to handle data scarcity through the design of task simulation mechanisms and a two-layer optimization strategy. Extensive experiments on the SEED-VIG dataset demonstrate that MEDS-Net outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in terms of effectiveness and generalizability. Furthermore, MEDS-Net can precisely quantify the importance of global features in explaining modal contributions and average activation patterns.