Application of empirical mode decomposition and Teager energy operator to EEG signals for mental task classification

Recognition of multi-cognitive tasks from EEG signals using EMD methods

Mental task classification (MTC), based on the electroencephalography (EEG) signals is a demanding brain–computer interface (BCI). It is independent of all types of muscular activity. MTC-based BCI systems are capable to identify cognitive activity of human. The success of BCI system depends upon the efficient feature representation from raw EEG signals for classification of mental activities. This paper mainly presents on a novel feature representation (formation of most informative features) of the EEG signal for the both, binary as well as multi MTC, using a combination of some statistical, uncertainty and memory- based coefficient. In this work, the feature formation is carried out in the two stages. In the first stage, the signal is split into different oscillatory functions with the help of three well-known empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithms, and a new set of eight parameters (features) are calculated from the oscillatory function in the second stage of feature vector construction. Support vector machine (SVM) is used to classify the feature vectors obtained corresponding to the different mental tasks. This study consists the problem formulation of two variants of MTC; two-class and multi-class MTC. The suggested scheme outperforms the existing work for the both types of mental tasks classification.

Automatic identification of Cyclic Alternating Pattern (CAP) sequences based on the Teager Energy Operator

The Cyclic Alternating Pattern (CAP) is a periodic cerebral activity prevalent during Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep-stages. The CAP is composed by A-phases that are related to a change in amplitude, frequency or both from the background activity epochs, called B-phases. Depending on the type of increase the A-phase could be classified as A1, A2 or A3 subtype. This paper proposes the usage of the Teager Energy Operator (TEO) to analyze the amplitude changes in the different frequency-bands to detect A-phases subtypes. The TEO classification performance is compared with the performance of a state-of-the art EEG feature, applied previously for CAP scoring and referred as the macro-micro structure descriptor (MMSD). In general, the TEO is the best feature and the improved results were obtained in the delta band for the A1 and A2 sub-types. More precisely, a sensitivity and specificity of 80.31% and 82.93% were obtained for the A1 subtype, respectively. A2 phases were detected with 76.96% of sensitivity and 73.22% of specificity. The two features detected A3 subtype with approximately the same sensitivity (approx. 70%) and specificity (approx. 75%), however the results were improved by considering the highest frequency band. These results are consistent with the frequency content of the different sub-phases.

Localization of brain activities using multiway analysis of EEG tensor via EMD and reassigned TF representation

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is widely used for monitoring, diagnosis purposes and also for study of brain's physiological, mental and functional abnormalities. Processing of information by the brain is reflected in dynamical changes of the electrical activity in time, frequency, and space. EEG signal processing tends to describe and quantify these variations in such a way that they are localized in temporal, spectral and spatial domain. Here we use multi-way (Tensor) analysis for localizing the EEG events. We used EMD process for decomposing EEG into distinct oscillatory modes, which are then mapped to TF plane using the near optimal Reassigned Spectrogram. Temporal, Spatial and Spectral information of the Multichannel EEG are then used to generate a three-way Frequency-Time-Space EEG tensor. Exploiting EMD also enables us to detrend the EEG recordings. Simulation results on both synthetic and real EEG data show that tensor analysis greatly improve separation and localization of overlapping events in EEG and it could be effectively exploited for detecting and characterizing the evoked potentials.

Application of a variation of empirical mode decomposition and Teager energy operator to EEG signals for mental task classification

This paper presents a simple and effective methodology for mental task classification using a novel variation of the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithm and the Teager energy operator applied to electroencephalography (EEG) signals. EEG signals corresponding to various types of mental tasks performed by human subjects are decomposed using the variation of EMD, called Empirical Mode Decomposition-Modified Peak Selection (EMD-MPS), which allows direct separation of the signals into a de-trended component, and a trend, according to a frequency separation criterion. Teager energy operator is then applied to calculate the average energy values of both components obtained after signal decomposition using EMD-MPS. These energy values are used to construct feature vectors, and one-versus-one classification of mental tasks is performed using a simple classifier, namely the 1-NN classifier. An average correct classification rate of 87% is obtained, improving on previous results and thereby also demonstrating the effectiveness of the methodology.

Telephone-quality pathological speech classification using empirical mode decomposition

This paper presents a computationally simple and effective methodology based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) for classification of telephone quality normal and pathological speech signals. EMD is used to decompose continuous normal and pathological speech signals into intrinsic mode functions, which are analyzed to extract physically meaningful and unique temporal and spectral features. Using continuous speech samples from a database of 51 normal and 161 pathological speakers, which has been modified to simulate telephone quality speech under different levels of noise, a linear classifier is used with the feature vector thus obtained to obtain a high classification accuracy, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of the methodology. The classification accuracy reported in this paper (89.7% for signal-to-noise ratio 30 dB) is a significant improvement over previously reported results for the same task, and demonstrates the utility of our methodology for cost-effective remote voice pathology assessment over telephone channels.