A Novel Method in Attention Measurement for Operators of Radar Devices Based on P300 Event-Related Potential Protocols Detection

Abstract

Various methods have been proposed to detect the attention and perception of an operator during tasks such as radar monitoring. Due to the high accuracy of electroencephalographic signals, it is utilized for systems based on brain signal. The eventrelated potential (ERP) technique has been widely used for testing theories of perception and attention. Brain-computer Interface (BCI) provides the communication link between the human’s brain and an external device. In this article, we propose a method to investigate the attention of operators of very sensitive monitoring devices, in particular, the operators of navy ships’ radars in detecting fighter aircrafts. Using a Visual Stimuli, which was shown to the subjects prior to the test, the protocol utilized in this paper yielded a very high accuracy (up to 87%), which makes it a robust method to use in such conditions. Linear LDA and non-linear SVM classifiers were utilized in processing the output signal. Although several P300 systems have been used to detect attention using pattern recognition techniques, the novelty of this study is that attention detection is used for the first time for a radar operator which resulted in acceptable accuracy.