Symmetry-Aware Fatigue Driving Detection Based on Improved YOLOv8-LSTM with Enhanced Spatiotemporal Feature Fusion

Fatigue driving causes 20–30% of global traffic accidents. To address limitations in feature fusion and real-time performance, this study proposes an improved You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLOv8)-Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model with symmetry-aware spatiotemporal feature learning. In the spatial phase, Group Shuffle Convolution (GSConv) and Slim Neck structures are introduced to enhance facial feature detection while reducing parameters by 32.3%. In the temporal phase, an improved Inverted Transformer(iTransformer) with differential attention is integrated with an LSTM-Feed-Forward Network (FFN) architecture, achieving a 90.1% prediction accuracy and an 84.6% noise suppression rate. A standardized dataset of 13,200 images was constructed using a four-level classification system. By implementing TensorRT acceleration and multi-process parallel frameworks, the system optimizes single-frame latency to 38 ms—a 9.5× efficiency gain—while maintaining an overall detection accuracy of 92.4%. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively balances model lightweighting with high precision, providing a robust and efficient solution for real-time driver monitoring in complex driving scenarios.