A dual-branch multidimensional attention fusion network for EEG-based fatigue classification

Abstract

Introduction Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based fatigue classification is important for vigilance monitoring. Reliable recognition remains challenging due to fatigue-related neural changes that involve both spectral-temporal dynamics and altered inter-channel interactions. Methods This study develops a lightweight Dual-Branch Multidimensional Attention Fusion Network (DB-MDAFNet) that integrates spectral-temporal features and PCC-derived inter-channel dependency representations for EEG-based fatigue classification. The framework uses differential entropy features extracted from five canonical EEG frequency bands as input. A parameter-free multidimensional enhancement (PF-ME) module is applied for feature recalibration. It then extracts complementary representations via a Channel Attention-Multi-scale Temporal (CA-MT) branch and a Functional Connectivity-Topological Encoding (FC-TE) branch derived from Pearson correlation coefficients (PCC). The fused representation is used to classify EEG samples into alert, tired, and drowsy states. Experiments were conducted on the public SEED-VIG dataset and the self-constructed video game-based fatigue dataset (DVG). Results Under identical subject-dependent settings, DB-MDAFNet achieved 85.58% accuracy on SEED-VIG and 97.12%–98.56% accuracy on DVG datasets. The model maintained a compact architecture, with 0.185 M parameters under the DVG input configuration. Ablation results indicated the complementary contribution of the two branches. Model interpretability analyses suggested that the learned representations contained spatially structured patterns across frontal, parietal, and occipital electrode regions. Discussion The proposed framework, integrating multi-scale temporal learning with connectivity-derived topological encoding, provides a lightweight and interpretable architecture for EEG-based fatigue monitoring.