Sparse Group Representation Model for Motor Imagery EEG Classification

Multiclass Classification Framework of Motor Imagery EEG by Riemannian Geometry Networks

In motor imagery (MI) tasks for brain computer interfaces (BCIs), the spatial covariance matrix (SCM) of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals plays a critical role in accurate classification. Given that SCMs are symmetric positive definite (SPD), Riemannian geometry is widely utilized to extract classification features. However, calculating distances between SCMs is computationally intensive due to operations like eigenvalue decomposition, and classical optimization techniques, such as gradient descent, cannot be directly applied to Riemannian manifolds, making the computation of the Riemannian mean more complex and reliant on iterative methods or approximations. In this paper, we propose a novel multiclass classification framework that integrates Riemannian geometry and neural networks to mitigate these challenges. The framework comprises two modules: a Riemannian module with multiple branches and a classification module. During training, a fusion loss function is introduced to update the branch corresponding to the true label, while other branches are updated using different loss functions along with the classification module. Comprehensive experiments on four sets of MI EEG data demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed model.

Optimized FFNN with multichannel CSP-ICA framework of EEG signal for BCI

The electroencephalogram (EEG) of the patient is used to identify their motor intention, which is then converted into a control signal through a brain-computer interface (BCI) based on motor imagery. Whenever gathering features from EEG signals, making a BCI is difficult in part because of the enormous dimensionality of the data. Three stages make up the suggested methodology: pre-processing, extraction of features, selection, and categorization. To remove unwanted artifacts, the EEG signals are filtered by a fifth-order Butterworth multichannel band-pass filter. This decreases execution time and memory use, both of which improve system performance. Then a novel multichannel optimized CSP-ICA feature extraction technique is used to separate and eliminate non-discriminative information from discriminative information in the EEG channels. Furthermore, CSP uses the concept of an Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm to automatically identify the simultaneous global ideal frequency band and time interval combination for the extraction and classification of common spatial pattern characteristics. Finally, a Tunable optimized feed-forward neural network (FFNN) classifier is utilized to extract and categorize the temporal and frequency domain features, which employs an FFNN classifier with Tunable-Q wavelet transform. The proposed framework, therefore optimizes signal processing, enabling enhanced EEG signal classification for BCI applications. The result shows that the models that use Tunable optimized FFNN produce higher classification accuracy of more than 20% when compared to the existing models.

Optimizing motion imagery classification with limited channels using the common spatial pattern-based integrated algorithm

The extraction of effective classification features from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals in motor imagery is a popular research topic. The Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) algorithm is widely employed in this field. However, the performance of the traditional CSP method depends significantly on the choice of a specific frequency band and channel number of EEG data. Furthermore, inter-class variance among these frequency bands and the limited number of available EEG channels can adversely affect the CSP algorithm's ability to extract meaningful features from the relevant signal frequency bands. We hypothesize that multiple Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFS), into which the raw EEG signal is decomposed, can better capture the non-Gaussian characteristics of the signal, thus compensating for the limitations of the CSP algorithm when dealing with nonlinear and non-Gaussian distributed data with few channels. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel method that integrates Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD), Phase Space Reconstruction (PSR), and the CSP algorithm to address these issues. VMD is used to filter and enhance the quality of the collected data, PSR is employed to increase the effective data channels (data augmentation), and the subsequent CSP filtering can obtain signals with spatial features, which are decoded by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for action decoding. This study utilizes self-collected EEG data to demonstrate that the new method can achieve a good classification accuracy of 82.30% on average, confirming the improved algorithm's effectiveness and feasibility. Furthermore, this study conducted validation on the publicly available BCI Competition IV dataset 2b, demonstrating an average classification accuracy of 87.49%.

Motor Imagery EEG Signal Classification Using Distinctive Feature Fusion with Adaptive Structural LASSO

A motor imagery brain-computer interface connects the human brain and computers via electroencephalography (EEG). However, individual differences in the frequency ranges of brain activity during motor imagery tasks pose a challenge, limiting the manual feature extraction for motor imagery classification. To extract features that match specific subjects, we proposed a novel motor imagery classification model using distinctive feature fusion with adaptive structural LASSO. Specifically, we extracted spatial domain features from overlapping and multi-scale sub-bands of EEG signals and mined discriminative features by fusing the task relevance of features with spatial information into the adaptive LASSO-based feature selection. We evaluated the proposed model on public motor imagery EEG datasets, demonstrating that the model has excellent performance. Meanwhile, ablation studies and feature selection visualization of the proposed model further verified the great potential of EEG analysis.

TSPNet: a time-spatial parallel network for classification of EEG-based multiclass upper limb motor imagery BCI

The classification of electroencephalogram (EEG) motor imagery signals has emerged as a prominent research focus within the realm of brain-computer interfaces. Nevertheless, the conventional, limited categories (typically just two or four) offered by brain-computer interfaces fail to provide an extensive array of control modes. To address this challenge, we propose the Time-Spatial Parallel Network (TSPNet) for recognizing six distinct categories of upper limb motor imagery. Within TSPNet, temporal and spatial features are extracted separately, with the time dimension feature extractor and spatial dimension feature extractor performing their respective functions. Following this, the Time-Spatial Parallel Feature Extractor is employed to decouple the connection between temporal and spatial features, thus diminishing feature redundancy. The Time-Spatial Parallel Feature Extractor deploys a gating mechanism to optimize weight distribution and parallelize time-spatial features. Additionally, we introduce a feature visualization algorithm based on signal occlusion frequency to facilitate a qualitative analysis of TSPNet. In a six-category scenario, TSPNet achieved an accuracy of 49.1% ± 0.043 on our dataset and 49.7% ± 0.029 on a public dataset. Experimental results conclusively establish that TSPNet outperforms other deep learning methods in classifying data from these two datasets. Moreover, visualization results vividly illustrate that our proposed framework can generate distinctive classifier patterns for multiple categories of upper limb motor imagery, discerned through signals of varying frequencies. These findings underscore that, in comparison to other deep learning methods, TSPNet excels in intention recognition, which bears immense significance for non-invasive brain-computer interfaces.

Multi-domain feature joint optimization based on multi-view learning for improving the EEG decoding

Background

Brain-computer interface (BCI) systems based on motor imagery (MI) have been widely used in neurorehabilitation. Feature extraction applied by the common spatial pattern (CSP) is very popular in MI classification. The effectiveness of CSP is highly affected by the frequency band and time window of electroencephalogram (EEG) segments and channels selected.

Objective

In this study, the multi-domain feature joint optimization (MDFJO) based on the multi-view learning method is proposed, which aims to select the discriminative features enhancing the classification performance.

Method

The channel patterns are divided using the Fisher discriminant criterion (FDC). Furthermore, the raw EEG is intercepted for multiple sub-bands and time interval signals. The high-dimensional features are constructed by extracting features from CSP on each EEG segment. Specifically, the multi-view learning method is used to select the optimal features, and the proposed feature sparsification strategy on the time level is proposed to further refine the optimal features.

Results

Two public EEG datasets are employed to validate the proposed MDFJO method. The average classification accuracy of the MDFJO in Data 1 and Data 2 is 88.29 and 87.21%, respectively. The classification result of MDFJO was significantly better than MSO (p < 0.05), FBCSP32 (p < 0.01), and other competing methods (p < 0.001).

Conclusion

Compared with the CSP, sparse filter band common spatial pattern (SFBCSP), and filter bank common spatial pattern (FBCSP) methods with channel numbers 16, 32 and all channels as well as MSO, the MDFJO significantly improves the test accuracy. The feature sparsification strategy proposed in this article can effectively enhance classification accuracy. The proposed method could improve the practicability and effectiveness of the BCI system.

A multi-band centroid contrastive reconstruction fusion network for motor imagery electroencephalogram signal decoding

Motor imagery (MI) brain-computer interface (BCI) assist users in establishing direct communication between their brain and external devices by decoding the movement intention of human electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. However, cerebral cortical potentials are highly rhythmic and sub-band features, different experimental situations and subjects have different categories of semantic information in specific sample target spaces. Feature fusion can lead to more discriminative features, but simple fusion of features from different embedding spaces leading to the model global loss is not easily convergent and ignores the complementarity of features. Considering the similarity and category contribution of different sub-band features, we propose a multi-band centroid contrastive reconstruction fusion network (MB-CCRF). We obtain multi-band spatio-temporal features by frequency division, preserving the task-related rhythmic features of different EEG signals; use a multi-stream cross-layer connected convolutional network to perform a deep feature representation for each sub-band separately; propose a centroid contrastive reconstruction fusion module, which maps different sub-band and category features into the same shared embedding space by comparing with category prototypes, reconstructing the feature semantic structure to ensure that the global loss of the fused features converges more easily. Finally, we use a learning mechanism to model the similarity between channel features and use it as the weight of fused sub-band features, thus enhancing the more discriminative features, suppressing the useless features. The experimental accuracy is 79.96% in the BCI competition Ⅳ-Ⅱa dataset. Moreover, the classification effect of sub-band features of different subjects is verified by comparison tests, the category propensity of different sub-band features is verified by confusion matrix tests and the distribution in different classes of each sub-band feature and fused feature are showed by visual analysis, revealing the importance of different sub-band features for the EEG-based MI classification task.

Cauchy non-convex sparse feature selection method for the high-dimensional small-sample problem in motor imagery EEG decoding

Introduction

The time, frequency, and space information of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is crucial for motor imagery decoding. However, these temporal-frequency-spatial features are high-dimensional small-sample data, which poses significant challenges for motor imagery decoding. Sparse regularization is an effective method for addressing this issue. However, the most commonly employed sparse regularization models in motor imagery decoding, such as the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), is a biased estimation method and leads to the loss of target feature information.

Methods

In this paper, we propose a non-convex sparse regularization model that employs the Cauchy function. By designing a proximal gradient algorithm, our proposed model achieves closer-to-unbiased estimation than existing sparse models. Therefore, it can learn more accurate, discriminative, and effective feature information. Additionally, the proposed method can perform feature selection and classification simultaneously, without requiring additional classifiers.

Results

We conducted experiments on two publicly available motor imagery EEG datasets. The proposed method achieved an average classification accuracy of 82.98% and 64.45% in subject-dependent and subject-independent decoding assessment methods, respectively.

Conclusion

The experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of motor imagery decoding, with better classification performance than existing feature selection and deep learning methods. Furthermore, the proposed model shows better generalization capability, with parameter consistency over different datasets and robust classification across different training sample sizes. Compared with existing sparse regularization methods, the proposed method converges faster, and with shorter model training time.

Motor imagery classification using sparse representations: an exploratory study

The non-stationary nature of the EEG signal poses challenges for the classification of motor imagery. sparse representation classification (SRC) appears as an alternative for classification of untrained conditions and, therefore, useful in motor imagery. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) deals with signals of this nature and appears at the rear of the classification, supporting the generation of features. In this work we evaluate the combination of these methods in a multiclass classification problem, comparing them with a conventional method in order to determine if their performance is regular. For comparison with SRC we use multilayer perceptron (MLP). We also evaluated a hybrid approach for classification of sparse representations with MLP (RSMLP). For comparison with EMD we used filtering by frequency bands. Feature selection methods were used to select the most significant ones, specifically Random Forest and Particle Swarm Optimization. Finally, we used data augmentation to get a more voluminous base. Regarding the first dataset, we observed that the classifiers that use sparse representation have results equivalent to each other, but they outperform the conventional MLP model. SRC and SRMLP achieve an average accuracy of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] respectively while the MLP is [Formula: see text], representing a gain between [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. The use of EMD in relation to other feature processing techniques is not superior. However, EMD does not influence negatively, there is an opportunity for improvement. Finally, the use of data augmentation proved to be important to obtain relevant results. In the second dataset, we did not observe the same results. Models based on sparse representation (SRC, SRMLP, etc.) have on average a performance close to other conventional models, but without surpassing them. The best sparse models achieve an average accuracy of [Formula: see text] among the subjects in the base, while other model reach [Formula: see text]. The improvement of self-adaptive mechanisms that respond efficiently to the user's context is a good way to achieve improvements in motor imagery applications. However, other scenarios should be investigated, since the advantage of these methods was not proven in all datasets studied. There is still room for improvement, such as optimizing the dictionary of sparse representation in the context of motor imagery. Investing efforts in synthetically increasing the training base has also proved important to reduce the costs of this group of applications.

A shallow mirror transformer for subject-independent motor imagery BCI

OBJECTIVE

Motor imagery BCI plays an increasingly important role in motor disorders rehabilitation. However, the position and duration of the discriminative segment in an EEG trial vary from subject to subject and even trial to trial, and this leads to poor performance of subject-independent motor imagery classification. Thus, determining how to detect and utilize the discriminative signal segments is crucial for improving the performance of subject-independent motor imagery BCI.

APPROACH

In this paper, a shallow mirror transformer is proposed for subject-independent motor imagery EEG classification. Specifically, a multihead self-attention layer with a global receptive field is employed to detect and utilize the discriminative segment from the entire input EEG trial. Furthermore, the mirror EEG signal and the mirror network structure are constructed to improve the classification precision based on ensemble learning. Finally, the subject-independent setup was used to evaluate the shallow mirror transformer on motor imagery EEG signals from subjects existing in the training set and new subjects.

MAIN RESULTS

The experiments results on BCI Competition IV datasets 2a and 2b and the OpenBMI dataset demonstrated the promising effectiveness of the proposed shallow mirror transformer. The shallow mirror transformer obtained average accuracies of 74.48% and 76.1% for new subjects and existing subjects, respectively, which were highest among the compared state-of-the-art methods. In addition, visualization of the attention score showed the ability of discriminative EEG segment detection. This paper demonstrated that multihead self-attention is effective in capturing global EEG signal information in motor imagery classification.

SIGNIFICANCE

This study provides an effective model based on a multihead self-attention layer for subject-independent motor imagery-based BCIs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the shallowest transformer model available, in which a small number of parameters promotes the performance in motor imagery EEG classification for such a small sample problem.

An Integrated Machine Learning-Based Brain Computer Interface to Classify Diverse Limb Motor Tasks: Explainable Model

Terminal neurological conditions can affect millions of people worldwide and hinder them from doing their daily tasks and movements normally. Brain computer interface (BCI) is the best hope for many individuals with motor deficiencies. It will help many patients interact with the outside world and handle their daily tasks without assistance. Therefore, machine learning-based BCI systems have emerged as non-invasive techniques for reading out signals from the brain and interpreting them into commands to help those people to perform diverse limb motor tasks. This paper proposes an innovative and improved machine learning-based BCI system that analyzes EEG signals obtained from motor imagery to distinguish among various limb motor tasks based on BCI competition III dataset IVa. The proposed framework pipeline for EEG signal processing performs the following major steps. The first step uses a meta-heuristic optimization technique, called the whale optimization algorithm (WOA), to select the optimal features for discriminating between neural activity patterns. The pipeline then uses machine learning models such as LDA, k-NN, DT, RF, and LR to analyze the chosen features to enhance the precision of EEG signal analysis. The proposed BCI system, which merges the WOA as a feature selection method and the optimized k-NN classification model, demonstrated an overall accuracy of 98.6%, outperforming other machine learning models and previous techniques on the BCI competition III dataset IVa. Additionally, the EEG feature contribution in the ML classification model is reported using Explainable AI (XAI) tools, which provide insights into the individual contributions of the features in the predictions made by the model. By incorporating XAI techniques, the results of this study offer greater transparency and understanding of the relationship between the EEG features and the model's predictions. The proposed method shows potential levels for better use in controlling diverse limb motor tasks to help people with limb impairments and support them while enhancing their quality of life.

Classification of BCI Multiclass Motor Imagery Task Based on Artificial Neural Network

Motor imagery (MI) signals recorded by electroencephalography provide the most practical basis for conceiving brain-computer interfaces (BCI). These interfaces offer a high degree of freedom. This helps people with motor disabilities communicate with the device by tackling a sequence of motor imagery tasks. However, the extracting user-specific features and increasing the accuracy of the classifier remain as difficult tasks in MI-based BCI. In this work, we propose a new method using artificial neural network (ANN) enhancing the performance of the motor imagery classification. Feature extraction techniques, like time domain parameters, band power features, signal power features, and wavelet packet decomposition (WPD), are studied and compared. Four classification algorithms are implemented which are Quadratic Discriminant Analysis, k-Nearest Neighbors, Linear Discriminant Analysis, and proposed ANN architecture. We added Batch Normalization layers to the proposed ANN architecture to improve the learning time and accuracy of the neural network. These layers also alleviate the effect of weight initialization and the addition of a regularization effect on the network. Our proposed method using ANN architecture achieves 0.5545 of kappa and 58.42% of accuracy on the BCI Competition IV-2a dataset. Our results show that the modified ANN method, with frequency and spatial features extracted by WPD and Common Spatial Pattern, respectively, offers a better classification compared to other current methods.

Brain-Computer Interface using neural network and temporal-spectral features

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are increasingly useful for control. Such BCIs can be used to assist individuals who lost mobility or control over their limbs, for recreational purposes such as gaming or semi-autonomous driving, or as an interface toward man-machine integration. Thus far, the performance of algorithms used for thought decoding has been limited. We show that by extracting temporal and spectral features from electroencephalography (EEG) signals and, following, using deep learning neural network to classify those features, one can significantly improve the performance of BCIs in predicting which motor action was imagined by a subject. Our movement prediction algorithm uses Sequential Backward Selection technique to jointly choose temporal and spectral features and a radial basis function neural network for the classification. The method shows an average performance increase of 3.50% compared to state-of-the-art benchmark algorithms. Using two popular public datasets our algorithm reaches 90.08% accuracy (compared to an average benchmark of 79.99%) on the first dataset and 88.74% (average benchmark: 82.01%) on the second dataset. Given the high variability within- and across-subjects in EEG-based action decoding, we suggest that using features from multiple modalities along with neural network classification protocol is likely to increase the performance of BCIs across various tasks.

Improving EEG Decoding via Clustering-Based Multitask Feature Learning

Accurate electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern decoding for specific mental tasks is one of the key steps for the development of brain-computer interface (BCI), which is quite challenging due to the considerably low signal-to-noise ratio of EEG collected at the brain scalp. Machine learning provides a promising technique to optimize EEG patterns toward better decoding accuracy. However, existing algorithms do not effectively explore the underlying data structure capturing the true EEG sample distribution and, hence, can only yield a suboptimal decoding accuracy. To uncover the intrinsic distribution structure of EEG data, we propose a clustering-based multitask feature learning algorithm for improved EEG pattern decoding. Specifically, we perform affinity propagation-based clustering to explore the subclasses (i.e., clusters) in each of the original classes and then assign each subclass a unique label based on a one-versus-all encoding strategy. With the encoded label matrix, we devise a novel multitask learning algorithm by exploiting the subclass relationship to jointly optimize the EEG pattern features from the uncovered subclasses. We then train a linear support vector machine with the optimized features for EEG pattern decoding. Extensive experimental studies are conducted on three EEG data sets to validate the effectiveness of our algorithm in comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches. The improved experimental results demonstrate the outstanding superiority of our algorithm, suggesting its prominent performance for EEG pattern decoding in BCI applications.

Multiview Feature Learning With Multiatlas-Based Functional Connectivity Networks for MCI Diagnosis

Functional connectivity (FC) networks built from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) has shown promising results for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and its prodromal stage, that is, mild cognitive impairment (MCI). FC is usually estimated as a temporal correlation of regional mean rs-fMRI signals between any pair of brain regions, and these regions are traditionally parcellated with a particular brain atlas. Most existing studies have adopted a predefined brain atlas for all subjects. However, the constructed FC networks inevitably ignore the potentially important subject-specific information, particularly, the subject-specific brain parcellation. Similar to the drawback of the "single view" (versus the "multiview" learning) in medical image-based classification, FC networks constructed based on a single atlas may not be sufficient to reveal the underlying complicated differences between normal controls and disease-affected patients due to the potential bias from that particular atlas. In this study, we propose a multiview feature learning method with multiatlas-based FC networks to improve MCI diagnosis. Specifically, a three-step transformation is implemented to generate multiple individually specified atlases from the standard automated anatomical labeling template, from which a set of atlas exemplars is selected. Multiple FC networks are constructed based on these preselected atlas exemplars, providing multiple views of the FC network-based feature representations for each subject. We then devise a multitask learning algorithm for joint feature selection from the constructed multiple FC networks. The selected features are jointly fed into a support vector machine classifier for multiatlas-based MCI diagnosis. Extensive experimental comparisons are carried out between the proposed method and other competing approaches, including the traditional single-atlas-based method. The results indicate that our method significantly improves the MCI classification, demonstrating its promise in the brain connectome-based individualized diagnosis of brain diseases.

A Subject-Independent Brain-Computer Interface Framework Based on Supervised Autoencoder

A calibration procedure is required in motor imagery-based brain-computer interface (MI-BCI) to tune the system for new users. This procedure is time-consuming and prevents naive users from using the system immediately. Developing a subject-independent MI-BCI system to reduce the calibration phase is still challenging due to the subject-dependent characteristics of the MI signals. Many algorithms based on machine learning and deep learning have been developed to extract high-level features from the MI signals to improve the subject-to-subject generalization of a BCI system. However, these methods are based on supervised learning and extract features useful for discriminating various MI signals. Hence, these approaches cannot find the common underlying patterns in the MI signals and their generalization level is limited. This paper proposes a subject-independent MI-BCI based on a supervised autoencoder (SAE) to circumvent the calibration phase. The suggested framework is validated on dataset 2a from BCI competition IV. The simulation results show that our SISAE model outperforms the conventional and widely used BCI algorithms, common spatial and filter bank common spatial patterns, in terms of the mean Kappa value, in eight out of nine subjects.

Transfer learning for motor imagery based brain-computer interfaces: A tutorial

A brain-computer interface (BCI) enables a user to communicate directly with an external device, e.g., a computer, using brain signals. It can be used to research, map, assist, augment, or repair human cognitive or sensory-motor functions. A closed-loop BCI system performs signal acquisition, temporal filtering, spatial filtering, feature engineering and classification, before sending out the control signal to an external device. Transfer learning (TL) has been widely used in motor imagery (MI) based BCIs to reduce the calibration effort for a new subject, greatly increasing their utility. This tutorial describes how TL can be considered in as many components of a BCI system as possible, and introduces a complete TL pipeline for MI-based BCIs. Examples on two MI datasets demonstrated the advantages of considering TL in multiple components of MI-based BCIs. Especially, integrating data alignment and sophisticated TL approaches can significantly improve the classification performance, and hence greatly reduces the calibration effort.

Motor Imagery Classification via Kernel-Based Domain Adaptation on an SPD Manifold

Background: Recording the calibration data of a brain–computer interface is a laborious process and is an unpleasant experience for the subjects. Domain adaptation is an effective technology to remedy the shortage of target data by leveraging rich labeled data from the sources. However, most prior methods have needed to extract the features of the EEG signal first, which triggers another challenge in BCI classification, due to small sample sets or a lack of labels for the target. Methods: In this paper, we propose a novel domain adaptation framework, referred to as kernel-based Riemannian manifold domain adaptation (KMDA). KMDA circumvents the tedious feature extraction process by analyzing the covariance matrices of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Covariance matrices define a symmetric positive definite space (SPD) that can be described by Riemannian metrics. In KMDA, the covariance matrices are aligned in the Riemannian manifold, and then are mapped to a high dimensional space by a log-Euclidean metric Gaussian kernel, where subspace learning is performed by minimizing the conditional distribution distance between the sources and the target while preserving the target discriminative information. We also present an approach to convert the EEG trials into 2D frames (E-frames) to further lower the dimension of covariance descriptors. Results: Experiments on three EEG datasets demonstrated that KMDA outperforms several state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods in classification accuracy, with an average Kappa of 0.56 for BCI competition IV dataset IIa, 0.75 for BCI competition IV dataset IIIa, and an average accuracy of 81.56% for BCI competition III dataset IVa. Additionally, the overall accuracy was further improved by 5.28% with the E-frames. KMDA showed potential in addressing subject dependence and shortening the calibration time of motor imagery-based brain–computer interfaces.

Improved Brain-Computer Interface Signal Recognition Algorithm Based on Few-Channel Motor Imagery

Common spatial pattern (CSP) is an effective algorithm for extracting electroencephalogram (EEG) features of motor imagery (MI); however, CSP mainly aims at multichannel EEG signals, and its effect in extracting EEG features with fewer channels is poor-even worse than before using CSP. To solve the above problem, a new combined feature extraction method has been proposed in this study. For EEG signals from fewer channels (three channels), wavelet packet transform, fast ensemble empirical mode decomposition, and local mean decomposition were used to decompose the band-pass filtered EEG into multiple time-frequency components, and the corresponding components were selected according to the frequency characteristics of MI or the correlation coefficient between its time-frequency components and the original EEG signal. Furthermore, phase space reconstruction (PSR) was performed on the selected components after the three time-frequency decompositions, the maximum Lyapunov index was calculated, and the features were reconstructed; then, CSP projection mapping was used for the reconstructed features. The support vector machine probability output model was trained by the obtained three mappings. Probability outputs by three different support vector machines were then obtained. Finally, the classification of test samples was determined by the fusion of the Dempster-Shafer evidence theory at the decision level. The results showed that the accuracy of the proposed method was 95.71% on data set III of BCI competition II (left- and right-hand MI), which was 2.88% higher than the existing methods. On data set IIb of BCI competition IV, the average accuracy was 86.60%, which was 2.3% higher than the existing methods. This study verified the effectiveness of the proposed method and provided an approach for the research and development of the MI-BCI system based on fewer channels.

Robustly Effective Approaches on Motor Imagery-Based Brain Computer Interfaces

Motor Imagery Brain Computer Interfaces (MI-BCIs) are systems that receive the users’ brain activity as an input signal in order to communicate between the brain and the interface or an action to be performed through the detection of the imagination of a movement. Brainwaves’ features are crucial for the performance of the interface to be increased. The robustness of these features must be ensured in order for the effectiveness to remain high in various subjects. The present work consists of a review, which includes scientific publications related to the use of robust feature extraction methods in Motor Imagery from 2017 until today. The research showed that the majority of the works focus on spatial features through Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) methods (44.26%). Based on the combination of accuracy percentages and K-values, which show the effectiveness of each approach, Wavelet Transform (WT) has shown higher robustness than CSP and PSD methods in the majority of the datasets used for comparison and also in the majority of the works included in the present review, although they had a lower usage percentage in the literature (16.65%). The research showed that there was an increase in 2019 of the detection of spatial features to increase the robustness of an approach, but the time-frequency features, or a combination of those, achieve better results with their increase starting from 2019 onwards. Additionally, Wavelet Transforms and their variants, in combination with deep learning, manage to achieve high percentages thus making a method robustly accurate.

Hand Motor Imagery Classification Using Effective Connectivity and Hierarchical Machine Learning in EEG Signals

Background

Motor Imagery (MI) Brain Computer Interface (BCI) directly links central nervous system to a computer or a device. Most MI-BCI structures rely on features of a single channel of Electroencephalogram (EEG). However, to provide more valuable features, the relationships among EEG channels in the form of effective brain connectivity analysis must be considered.

Objective

This study aims to identify a set of robust and discriminative effective connectivity features from EEG signals and to develop a hierarchical machine learning structure for discrimination of left and right hand MI task effectively.

Material and Methods

In this analytical study, we estimated effective connectivity using Granger Causality (GC) methods namely, Generalized Partial Directed Coherence (GPDC), Directed Transfer Function (DTF) and direct Directed Transfer Function (dDTF). These measures determine the transient causal relation between different brain areas. Then a feature subset selection method based on Kruskal-Wallis test was performed to choose most significant directed causal connection between channels. Moreover, the minimal-redundancy-maximal-relevance feature selection method is applied to discard non-significance features. Finally, support vector machine method is used for classification.

Results

The maximum value of the classification accuracies using GC methods over different frequency bands in 29 subjects in 60 trial is approximately 84% in Mu (8-12 Hz) - Beta1 (12 - 15 Hz) frequency band using GPDC method.

Conclusion

This new hierarchical automated BCI system could be applied for discrimination of left and right hand MI tasks from EEG signal, effectively.

Exploiting pretrained CNN models for the development of an EEG-based robust BCI framework

Identifying motor and mental imagery electroencephalography (EEG) signals is imperative to realizing automated, robust brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. In the present study, we proposed a pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN)-based new automated framework feasible for robust BCI systems with small and ample samples of motor and mental imagery EEG training data. The framework is explored by investigating the implications of different limiting factors, such as learning rates and optimizers, processed versus unprocessed scalograms, and features derived from untuned pretrained models in small, medium, and large pretrained CNN models. The experiments were performed on three public datasets obtained from BCI Competition III. The datasets were denoised with multiscale principal component analysis, and time-frequency scalograms were obtained by employing a continuous wavelet transform. The scalograms were fed into several variants of ten pretrained models for feature extraction and identification of different EEG tasks. The experimental results showed that ShuffleNet yielded the maximum average classification accuracy of 99.52% using an RMSProp optimizer with a learning rate of 0.000 1. It was observed that low learning rates converge to more optimal performances compared to high learning rates. Moreover, noisy scalograms and features extracted from untuned networks resulted in slightly lower performance than denoised scalograms and tuned networks, respectively. The overall results suggest that pretrained models are robust when identifying EEG signals because of their ability to preserve the time-frequency structure of EEG signals and promising classification outcomes.

EEGG: An Analytic Brain-computer Interface Algorithm

OBJECTIVE

Modeling the brain as a white box is vital for investigating the brain. However, the physical properties of the human brain are unclear. Therefore, BCI algorithms using EEG signals are generally a data-driven approach and generate a black- or gray-box model. This paper presents the first EEG-based BCI algorithm (EEG-BCI using Gang neurons, EEGG) decomposing the brain into some simple components with physical meaning and integrating recognition and analysis of brain activity.

APPROACH

Independent and interactive components of neurons or brain regions can fully describe the brain. This paper constructed a relation frame based on the independent and interactive compositions for intention recognition and analysis using a novel dendrite module of Gang neurons. A total of 4,906 EEG data of left- and right-hand motor imagery(MI) from 26 subjects were obtained from GigaDB. Firstly, this paper explored EEGG's classification performance by cross-subject accuracy. Secondly, this paper transformed the trained EEGG model into a relation spectrum expressing independent and interactive components of brain regions. Then, the relation spectrum was verified using the known ERD/ERS phenomenon. Finally, this paper explored the previously unreachable further BCI-based analysis of the brain.

MAIN RESULTS

(1) EEGG was more robust than typical "CSP+" algorithms for the low-quality data. (2) The relation spectrum showed the known ERD/ERS phenomenon. (3) Interestingly, EEGG showed that interactive components between brain regions suppressed ERD/ERS effects on classification. This means that generating fine hand intention needs more centralized activation in the brain.

SIGNIFICANCE

EEGG decomposed the biological EEG-intention system of this paper into the relation spectrum inheriting the Taylor series (in analogy with the data-driven but human-readable Fourier transform and frequency spectrum), which offers a novel frame for analysis of the brain.

Feature Extraction Method Based on Filter Banks and Riemannian Tangent Space in Motor-Imagery BCI

Optimal feature extraction for multi-category motor imagery brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCIs) is a research hotspot. The common spatial pattern (CSP) algorithm is one of the most widely used methods in MI-BCIs. However, its performance is adversely affected by variance in the operational frequency band and noise interference. Furthermore, the performance of CSP is not satisfactory when addressing multi-category classification problems. In this work, we propose a fusion method combining Filter Banks and Riemannian Tangent Space (FBRTS) in multiple time windows. FBRTS uses multiple filter banks to overcome the problem of variance in the operational frequency band. It also applies the Riemannian method to the covariance matrix extracted by the spatial filter to obtain more robust features in order to overcome the problem of noise interference. In addition, we use a One-Versus-Rest support vector machine (OVR-SVM) model to classify multi-category features. We evaluate our FBRTS method using BCI competition IV dataset 2a and 2b. The experimental results show that the average classification accuracy of our FBRTS method is 77.7% and 86.9% in datasets 2a and 2b respectively. By analyzing the influence of the different numbers of filter banks and time windows on the performance of our FBRTS method, we can identify the optimal number of filter banks and time windows. Additionally, our FBRTS method can obtain more distinctive features than the filter banks common spatial pattern (FBCSP) method in two-dimensional embedding space. These results show that our proposed method can improve the performance of MI-BCIs.

Resting State Functional Connectivity Analysis During General Anesthesia: A High-Density EEG Study

The depth of anesthesia monitoring is helpful to guide administrations of general anesthetics during surgical procedures,however, the conventional 2-4 channels electroencephalogram (EEG) derived monitors have their limitations in monitoring conscious states due to low spatial resolution and suboptimal algorithm. In this study, 256-channel high-density EEG signals in 24 subjects receiving three types of general anesthetics (propofol, sevoflurane and ketamine) respectively were recorded both before and after anesthesia. The raw EEG signals were preprocessed by EEGLAB 14.0. Functional connectivity (FC) analysis by traditional coherence analysis (CA) method and a novel sparse representation (SR) method. And the network parameters, average clustering coefficient (ACC) and average shortest path length (ASPL) before and after anesthesia were calculated. The results show SR method find more significant FC differences in frontal and occipital cortices, and whole brain network (p<0.05). In contrast, CA can hardly obtain consistent ASPL in the whole brain network (p>0.05). Further, ASPL calculated by SR for whole brain connections in all of three anesthesia groups increased, which can be a unified EEG biomarker of general anesthetics-induced loss of consciousness (LOC). Therefore FC analysis based on SR analysis has better performance in distinguishing anesthetic-induced LOC from awake state.

Neural Decoding of Chinese Sign Language With Machine Learning for Brain-Computer Interfaces

Limb motion decoding is an important part of brain-computer interface (BCI) research. Among the limb motion, sign language not only contains rich semantic information and abundant maneuverable actions but also provides different executable commands. However, many researchers focus on decoding the gross motor skills, such as the decoding of ordinary motor imagery or simple upper limb movements. Here we explored the neural features and decoding of Chinese sign language from electroencephalograph (EEG) signal with motor imagery and motor execution. Sign language not only contains rich semantic information, but also has abundant maneuverable actions, and provides us with more different executable commands. In this paper, twenty subjects were instructed to perform movement execution and movement imagery based on Chinese sign language. Seven classifiers are employed to classify the selected features of sign language EEG. L1 regularization is used to learn and select features that contain more information from the mean, power spectral density, sample entropy, and brain network connectivity. The best average classification accuracy of the classifier is 89.90% (imagery sign language is 83.40%). These results have shown the feasibility of decoding between different sign languages. The source location reveals that the neural circuits involved in sign language are related to the visual contact area and the pre-movement area. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed decoding strategy based on sign language can obtain outstanding classification results, which provides a certain reference value for the subsequent research of limb decoding based on sign language.

Recent Advances and Current Trends in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Research and Their Applications

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) provides direct communication between the brain and an external device. BCI systems have become a trendy field of research in recent years. These systems can be used in a variety of applications to help both disabled and healthy people. Concerning significant BCI progress, we may assume that these systems are not very far from real-world applications. This review has taken into account current trends in BCI research. In this survey, one hundred most cited articles from the WOS database were selected over the last four years. This survey is divided into several sectors. These sectors are Medicine, Communication and Control, Entertainment, and Other BCI applications. The application area, recording method, signal acquisition types, and countries of origin have been identified in each article. This survey provides an overview of the BCI articles published from 2016 to 2020 and their current trends and advances in different application areas.

MIN2Net: End-to-End Multi-Task Learning for Subject-Independent Motor Imagery EEG Classification

OBJECTIVE

Advances in the motor imagery (MI)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow control of several applications by decoding neurophysiological phenomena, which are usually recorded by electroencephalography (EEG) using a non-invasive technique. Despite significant advances in MI-based BCI, EEG rhythms are specific to a subject and various changes over time. These issues point to significant challenges to enhance the classification performance, especially in a subject-independent manner.

METHODS

To overcome these challenges, we propose MIN2Net, a novel end-to-end multi-task learning to tackle this task. We integrate deep metric learning into a multi-task autoencoder to learn a compact and discriminative latent representation from EEG and perform classification simultaneously.

RESULTS

This approach reduces the complexity in pre-processing, results in significant performance improvement on EEG classification. Experimental results in a subject-independent manner show that MIN2Net outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques, achieving an F1-score improvement of 6.72 %, and 2.23 % on the SMR-BCI, and OpenBMI datasets, respectively.

CONCLUSION

We demonstrate that MIN2Net improves discriminative information in the latent representation.

SIGNIFICANCE

This study indicates the possibility and practicality of using this model to develop MI-based BCI applications for new users without calibration.

Internal Feature Selection Method of CSP Based on L1-Norm and Dempster-Shafer Theory

The common spatial pattern (CSP) algorithm is a well-recognized spatial filtering method for feature extraction in motor imagery (MI)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, due to the influence of nonstationary in electroencephalography (EEG) and inherent defects of the CSP objective function, the spatial filters, and their corresponding features are not necessarily optimal in the feature space used within CSP. In this work, we design a new feature selection method to address this issue by selecting features based on an improved objective function. Especially, improvements are made in suppressing outliers and discovering features with larger interclass distances. Moreover, a fusion algorithm based on the Dempster-Shafer theory is proposed, which takes into consideration the distribution of features. With two competition data sets, we first evaluate the performance of the improved objective functions in terms of classification accuracy, feature distribution, and embeddability. Then, a comparison with other feature selection methods is carried out in both accuracy and computational time. Experimental results show that the proposed methods consume less additional computational cost and result in a significant increase in the performance of MI-based BCI systems.

A Review on Signal Processing Approaches to Reduce Calibration Time in EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interface

In an electroencephalogram- (EEG-) based brain–computer interface (BCI), a subject can directly communicate with an electronic device using his EEG signals in a safe and convenient way. However, the sensitivity to noise/artifact and the non-stationarity of EEG signals result in high inter-subject/session variability. Therefore, each subject usually spends long and tedious calibration time in building a subject-specific classifier. To solve this problem, we review existing signal processing approaches, including transfer learning (TL), semi-supervised learning (SSL), and a combination of TL and SSL. Cross-subject TL can transfer amounts of labeled samples from different source subjects for the target subject. Moreover, Cross-session/task/device TL can reduce the calibration time of the subject for the target session, task, or device by importing the labeled samples from the source sessions, tasks, or devices. SSL simultaneously utilizes the labeled and unlabeled samples from the target subject. The combination of TL and SSL can take advantage of each other. For each kind of signal processing approaches, we introduce their concepts and representative methods. The experimental results show that TL, SSL, and their combination can obtain good classification performance by effectively utilizing the samples available. In the end, we draw a conclusion and point to research directions in the future.

Sparse representation-based classification with two-dimensional dictionary optimization for motor imagery EEG pattern recognition

BACKGROUND

Sparse representation-based classification (SRC) has more advantages in motor imagery EEG pattern recognition, and the quality of dictionary construction directly determines the performance of SRC. In this paper, we proposed a two-dimensional dictionary optimization (TDDO) method to directly improve the performance of SRC.

NEW METHOD

Firstly, an initial dictionary was constructed with multi-band features extracted by filter band common spatial pattern (FBCSP). Then Lasso regression is used to select significant features in each atom synchronously in the horizontal direction, and the KNN-based method is used to clean up noise atoms in the vertical direction. Finally, an SRC method by training samples linearly representing test samples was implemented in classification.

RESULTS

The results show the necessity and rationality of TDDO-SRC method. The highest average classification accuracy of 86.5% and 92.4% is obtained on two public datasets.

COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHOD(S)

The proposed method has more superior classification accuracy compared to traditional methods and existing winners' methods.

CONCLUSIONS

The quality of dictionary construction has a great impact on the robustness of SRC. And compared with the original SRC, the classification accuracy of the optimized TDDO-SRC is greatly improved.

A CNN identified by reinforcement learning-based optimization framework for EEG-based state evaluation

Objective.Electroencephalogram (EEG) data, as a kind of complex time-series, is one of the most widely-used information measurements for evaluating human psychophysiological states. Recently, numerous works applied deep learning techniques, especially the convolutional neural network (CNN), into EEG-based research. The design of the hyper-parameters of the CNN model has a great influence on the performance of the model. Therefore, automatically designing these hyper-parameters can save the time and labor of experts. This leads to the appearance of the neural architecture search technique. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based step-by-step framework to efficiently search for CNN models.Approach.Specifically, the deep Q network in RL is first used to determine the depth of convolutional layers and the connection modes among layers. Then particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to fine-tune the number and size of convolution kernels. Through this step-by-step strategy, the search space can be narrowed in each step for saving the overall time cost. This framework is employed for both EEG-based sleep stage classification and driver drowsiness evaluation tasks.Main results.The results show that compared with state-of-the-art methods, the high-performance CNN models identified by the proposed optimization framework, can achieve high overall accuracy and better root mean squared error in the two tasks.Significance.Therefore, the proposed optimization framework has a great potential to provide high-performance results for other kinds of classification and prediction tasks. In this way, it can greatly save researchers' time cost and promote broader applications of CNNs.

Optimal channel-based sparse time-frequency blocks common spatial pattern feature extraction method for motor imagery classification

Common spatial pattern (CSP) as a spatial filtering method has been most widely applied to electroencephalogram (EEG) feature extraction to classify motor imagery (MI) in brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. The effectiveness of CSP is determined by the quality of interception in a specific time window and frequency band. Although numerous algorithms have been designed to optimize CSP by splitting the EEG data with a sliding time window and dividing the frequency bands with a set of band-pass filters, simultaneously. However, they did not consider the drawbacks of the rapid increase in data volume and feature dimensions brought about by this method, which would reduce the classification accuracy and calculation efficiency of the model. Therefore, we propose an optimal channel-based sparse time-frequency blocks common spatial pattern (OCSB-CSP) feature extraction method to improve the model classification accuracy and computational efficiency. Comparative experiments on two public EEG datasets show that the proposed method can quickly select significant time-frequency blocks and improve classification performance. The average classification accuracies are higher than those of other winners' methods, providing a new idea for the improvement of BCI applications.

Keyframe Extraction From Laparoscopic Videos via Diverse and Weighted Dictionary Selection

Laparoscopic videos have been increasingly acquired for various purposes including surgical training and quality assurance, due to the wide adoption of laparoscopy in minimally invasive surgeries. However, it is very time consuming to view a large amount of laparoscopic videos, which prevents the values of laparoscopic video archives from being well exploited. In this paper, a dictionary selection based video summarization method is proposed to effectively extract keyframes for fast access of laparoscopic videos. Firstly, unlike the low-level feature used in most existing summarization methods, deep features are extracted from a convolutional neural network to effectively represent video frames. Secondly, based on such a deep representation, laparoscopic video summarization is formulated as a diverse and weighted dictionary selection model, in which image quality is taken into account to select high quality keyframes, and a diversity regularization term is added to reduce redundancy among the selected keyframes. Finally, an iterative algorithm with a rapid convergence rate is designed for model optimization, and the convergence of the proposed method is also analyzed. Experimental results on a recently released laparoscopic dataset demonstrate the clear superiority of the proposed methods. The proposed method can facilitate the access of key information in surgeries, training of junior clinicians, explanations to patients, and archive of case files.

Learning Common Time-Frequency-Spatial Patterns for Motor Imagery Classification

The common spatial patterns (CSP) algorithm is the most popular spatial filtering method applied to extract electroencephalogram (EEG) features for motor imagery (MI) based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. The effectiveness of the CSP algorithm depends on optimal selection of the frequency band and time window from the EEG. Many algorithms have been designed to optimize frequency band selection for CSP, while few algorithms seek to optimize the time window. This study proposes a novel framework, termed common time-frequency-spatial patterns (CTFSP), to extract sparse CSP features from multi-band filtered EEG data in multiple time windows. Specifically, the whole MI period is first segmented into multiple subseries using a sliding time window approach. Then, sparse CSP features are extracted from multiple frequency bands in each time window. Finally, multiple support vector machine (SVM) classifiers with the Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel are trained to identify the MI tasks and the voting result of these classifiers determines the final output of the BCI. This study applies the proposed CTFSP algorithm to three public EEG datasets (BCI competition III dataset IVa, BCI competition III dataset IIIa, and BCI competition IV dataset 1) to validate its effectiveness, compared against several other state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is a promising candidate for improving the performance of MI-BCI systems.

Classification of motor imagery using a time-localised approach

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is getting increasing attention where classification of motor imagery (MI) using electroencephalography (EEG) signal plays a vital role. In traditional EEG-based BCI setup, after applying pre-processing like band-pass filtering and spatial filtering, features are extracted and are fed to the classifier. However, most of the traditional features are extracted from a single time window, which is usually the full-time frame of a cue-based MI signal. Such features are usually statistical characteristics like log-variance of the whole-time signal. Thus, the information, which is localised in time and crucial for subject-specific MI classification, is not best captured. In this work, a new time-localised approach is proposed where multiple time windows are used for feature extraction. We have developed a number of feature representations using those time windows. Our experimental results corroborate that the proposed approach can achieve higher accuracy of classification when compared to methods using conventional features using the same platform.

Cancelable HD-sEMG-Based Biometrics for Cross-Application Discrepant Personal Identification

With the soaring development of body sensor network (BSN)-based health informatics, information security in such medical devices has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Employing the biosignals acquired directly by the BSN as biometrics for personal identification is an effective approach. Noncancelability and cross-application invariance are two natural flaws of most traditional biometric modalities. Once the biometric template is exposed, it is compromised forever. Even worse, because the same biometrics may be employed as tokens for different accounts in multiple applications, the exposed template can be used to compromise other accounts. In this work, we propose a cancelable and cross-application discrepant biometric approach based on high-density surface electromyogram (HD-sEMG) for personal identification. We enrolled two accounts for each user. HD-sEMG signals from the right dorsal hand under isometric contractions of different finger muscles were employed as biometric tokens. Since isometric contraction, in contrast to dynamic contraction, requires no actual movement, the users' choice to login to different accounts is greatly protected against impostors. We realized a promising identification accuracy of 85.8% for 44 identities (22 subjects × 2 accounts) with training and testing data acquired 9 days apart. The high identification accuracy of different accounts for the same user demonstrates the promising cancelability and cross-application discrepancy of the proposed HD-sEMG-based biometrics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to employ HD-sEMG in personal identification applications, with signal variation across days considered.

A Dense Long Short-Term Memory Model for Enhancing the Imagery-Based Brain-Computer Interface

Imagery-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) aim to decode different neural activities into control signals by identifying and classifying various natural commands from electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns and then control corresponding equipment. However, several traditional BCI recognition algorithms have the “one person, one model” issue, where the convergence of the recognition model’s training process is complicated. In this study, a new BCI model with a Dense long short-term memory (Dense-LSTM) algorithm is proposed, which combines the event-related desynchronization (ERD) and the event-related synchronization (ERS) of the imagery-based BCI; model training and testing were conducted with its own data set. Furthermore, a new experimental platform was built to decode the neural activity of different subjects in a static state. Experimental evaluation of the proposed recognition algorithm presents an accuracy of 91.56%, which resolves the “one person one model” issue along with the difficulty of convergence in the training process.

A Comprehensive Review on Critical Issues and Possible Solutions of Motor Imagery Based Electroencephalography Brain-Computer Interface

Motor imagery (MI) based brain–computer interface (BCI) aims to provide a means of communication through the utilization of neural activity generated due to kinesthetic imagination of limbs. Every year, a significant number of publications that are related to new improvements, challenges, and breakthrough in MI-BCI are made. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the electroencephalogram (EEG) based MI-BCI system. It describes the current state of the art in different stages of the MI-BCI (data acquisition, MI training, preprocessing, feature extraction, channel and feature selection, and classification) pipeline. Although MI-BCI research has been going for many years, this technology is mostly confined to controlled lab environments. We discuss recent developments and critical algorithmic issues in MI-based BCI for commercial deployment.

Improving the performance of multisubject motor imagery-based BCIs using twin cascaded softmax CNNs

OBJECTIVE

Motor imagery (MI) EEG signals vary greatly among subjects, so scholarly research on motor imagery-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) has mainly focused on single-subject systems or subject-dependent systems. However, the single-subject model is applicable only to the target subject, and the small sample number greatly limits the performance of the model. This paper aims to study a convolutional neural network to achieve an adaptable MI-BCI that is applicable to multiple subjects.

APPROACH

In this paper, a twin cascaded softmax convolutional neural network (TCSCNN) is proposed for multisubject MI-BCIs. The proposed TCSCNN is independent and can be applied to any single-subject MI classification CNN model. First, to reduce the influence of individual differences, subject recognition and MI recognition are accomplished simultaneously. A cascaded softmax structure consisting of two softmax layers, related to subject recognition and MI recognition, is subsequently applied. Second, to improve the MI classification precision, a twin network structure is proposed on the basis of ensemble learning. TCSCNN is built by combining a cascaded softmax structure and twin network structure.

MAIN RESULTS

Experiments were conducted on three popular CNN models (EEGNet and Shallow ConvNet and Deep ConvNet from EEGDecoding) and three public datasets (BCI Competition IV datasets 2a and 2b and the High-Gamma dataset) to verify the performance of the proposed TCSCNN. The results show that compared with the state-of-the-art CNN model, the proposed TCSCNN obviously improves the precision and convergence of multisubject MI recognition.

SIGNIFICANCE

This study provides a promising scheme for multisubject MI-BCI, reflecting the progress made in the development and application of MI-BCIs.

OPTICAL+: a frequency-based deep learning scheme for recognizing brain wave signals

A human-computer interaction (HCI) system can be used to detect different categories of the brain wave signals that can be beneficial for neurorehabilitation, seizure detection and sleep stage classification. Research on developing HCI systems using brain wave signals has progressed a lot over the years. However, real-time implementation, computational complexity and accuracy are still a concern. In this work, we address the problem of selecting the appropriate filtering frequency band while also achieving a good system performance by proposing a frequency-based approach using long short-term memory network (LSTM) for recognizing different brain wave signals. Adaptive filtering using genetic algorithm is incorporated for a hybrid system utilizing common spatial pattern and LSTM network. The proposed method (OPTICAL+) achieved an overall average classification error rate of 30.41% and a kappa coefficient value of 0.398, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods. The proposed OPTICAL+ predictor can be used to develop improved HCI systems that will aid in neurorehabilitation and may also be beneficial for sleep stage classification and seizure detection.

Multi-View Multi-Scale Optimization of Feature Representation for EEG Classification Improvement

Effectively extracting common space pattern (CSP) features from motor imagery (MI) EEG signals is often highly dependent on the filter band selection. At the same time, optimizing the EEG channel combinations is another key issue that substantially affects the SMR feature representations. Although numerous algorithms have been developed to find channels that record important characteristics of MI, most of them select channels in a cumbersome way with low computational efficiency, thereby limiting the practicality of MI-based BCI systems. In this study, we propose the multi-scale optimization (MSO) of spatial patterns, optimizing filter bands over multiple channel sets within CSPs to further improve the performance of MI-based BCI. Specifically, several channel subsets are first heuristically predefined, and then raw EEG data specific to each of these subsets bandpass-filtered at the overlap between a set of filter bands. Further, instead of solving learning problems for each channel subset independently, we propose a multi-view learning based sparse optimization to jointly extract robust CSP features with L_2,1 -norm regularization, aiming to capture the shared salient information across multiple related spatial patterns for enhanced classification performance. A support vector machine (SVM) classifier is then trained on these optimized EEG features for accurate recognition of MI tasks. Experimental results on three public EEG datasets validate the effectiveness of MSO compared to several other competing methods and their variants. These superior experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MSO method has promising potential in MI-based BCIs.