Spectral and Temporal Feature Learning With Two-Stream Neural Networks for Mental Workload Assessment

People’s mental workload profoundly affects their work efficiency and health. Mental workload assessment can be used to effectively avoid serious accidents caused by excessive mental workload. Both electroencephalogram (EEG) spectral features and its temporal features have proven to be useful in addressing this problem. The fusion of the two types of features can provide rich distinguishing information for improving mental workload assessment. Benefiting from the progress of deep learning, this study proposes the two-stream neural networks (TSNN) for fusing the two types of EEG features. Compared with hand-crafted features, the TSNN can learn and fuse EEG features from the spectral and temporal dimensions automatically without prior knowledge. The TSNN includes a spectral stream and a temporal stream. Each stream consists of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a temporal convolutional network (TCN) to learn spectral or temporal features from EEG topographic maps. To fuse the learned spectral and temporal information, we concatenate the output of the two streams prior to the fully connected layer. EEG data were collected from 17 subjects who performed n-back tasks with easy, medium, and hard difficulty levels, leading to a three-class mental workload classification. The results show that the TSNN achieves an average accuracy of 91.9%, which is a significant improvement over baseline classifiers based on hand-crafted features. The TSNN also outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning methods developed for EEG classification. The results indicate that the proposed structure is promising for fusing spectral and temporal features for mental workload assessment. In addition, it provides a high-precision approach for potential applications during cognitive activities.