Presenting nonlinear synchronous common spatial pattern for cue-based BCI

The modern commercial industry is increasingly dependent on the analysis of vast data records. Analysing big electroencephalogram (EEG) signal data (called brain signal data) plays an important role in a wide variety of applications such as healthcare practices, brain computer interface (BCI) systems, innovative education, privacy and security, and biometrics. The key objective of this paper is to establish a methodological framework for identifying communicative intentions of motor disabled people from EEG data for application in BCI systems. The proposed framework is designed based on common spatial pattern (CSP) data method and optimized ensemble (OE) machine learning method for the application of BCI technologies. The CSP method is used for discovering important features from EEG data and finally the extracted features are fed as an input to optimized ensemble (OE) method. The proposed method was tested on BCI Competition III dataset IVa, which contains motor imagery-based EEG signal data. The experimental results show that our proposed method can handle brain signal big data for identifying communicative intentions for an advanced BCI system. We compared the performance of our proposed method with several other existing methods. In comparison with other established methods, our method achieves higher classification accuracy performance. This research assists the experts in processing and analysing EEG signals for BCI applications. It also supports technologists to create a new EEG data analyser for BCI systems.KeywordsElectroencephalographyBrain computer interfaceCommon spatial patternMachine learning

A general framework to estimate spatial and spatio-spectral filters for EEG signal classification

The Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) method is a widely used spatial filtering technique that can extract discriminative features for Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain computer interface (BCI) classification tasks. Since the EEG signal acquired on the scalp is a nonlinear composition of multiple signal and noise sources, in order to characterize the nonlinear data structure, nonlinear CSP methods have been proposed by using the kernel technique. Most kernel CSP methods calculate temporal covariance structure in a kernel feature space that leads to a large kernel matrix with each dimension equal to the number of time points multiplied by the number of classes. In this work, a kernel CSP method exploiting spatial covariance structure in the feature space is developed where the size of kernel matrix is the number of EEG channels, which is usually much less than that of time points. The proposed method was evaluated using motor imagery EEG data. Results indicate that the kernel CSP using spatial analysis can provide comparable performance to the existing methods using temporal analysis with less computational load.

Asynchronous Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is an important class of BCI systems that has not received enough attention from the BCI community. In this work we introduce for the first time a system for classification of four different motor imageries in the context of an asynchronous BCI system which distinguishes between periods of movement imagination occurrence and idling or resting periods of ongoing EEG signal as well as classifying the 4 class motor imageries. We used two multi class extensions of the method of Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) for feature extraction and LDA, SVM, and MDA well known classifiers for combination purposes. We have applied our procedure to data set IIIa from BCI Competition III [2]. Offline evaluation of a prototype system demonstrated true positive rates in the range of 56%-88% with corresponding false positive rates in the range of 18%-9%.

Over the past decade, many laboratories have begun to explore brain-computer interface (BCI) technology as a radically new communication option. BCI can help users send messages and commands to the external world without using their brain's normal output channels or muscles. The central element in each BCI system is to find a reliable method to detect the specific feature patterns extracted from the raw brain signals, and then translate it into usable control signals. In this paper, we introduce our approach to detect N170 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) based on its spatiotemporal patterns in single-trial EEG signals. Common spatial pattern (CSP) method and machine-learning technique support vector machine (SVM) are adopted for N170 feature extraction and translation, i.e. they convert electrophysiological input from the user into on-off signal to control external devices. Our results indicate that the CSP can effectively extract discriminatory information, and SVM has an efficient performance for N170 classification. Comparing to several other methods, high performances of our framework show that the temporal and spatial features of N170 are very stable and it is promising for new type BCI applications.

Common spatial pattern (CSP) method is widely used in brain machine interface (BMI) applications to extract features from the multichannel neural activity through a set of spatial projections. The CSP method easily overfits the data when the number of training trials is not sufficiently large and it is sensitive to daily variation of multichannel electrode placement, which limits its applicability for everyday use in BMI systems. To overcome these problems, the amount of channels that is used in projections, should be limited. We introduce a spatially sparse projection (SSP) method that exploits the unconstrained minimization of a new objective function with approximated l penalty. The SSP method is employed to classify the two class EEG data set. Our method outperforms the standard CSP method and provides comparable results to £o norm based solution and it is associated with less computational complexity.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) systems are proposed as a means of communication for locked-in patients. One common BCI paradigm is motor imagery in which the user controls a BCI by imagining movements of different body parts. It is known that imagining different body parts results in event-related desynchronization (ERD) in various frequency bands. Existing methods such as common spatial patterns (CSP) and its refinement filterbank common spatial patterns (FB-CSP) aim at finding features that are informative for classification of the motor imagery class. Our proposed method is a temporally adaptive common spatial patterns implementation of the commonly used filter-bank common spatial patterns method using convolutional neural networks; hence it is called TA-CSPNN. With this method we aim to: (1) make the feature extraction and classification end-to-end, (2) base it on the way CSP/FBCSP extracts relevant features, and finally, (3) reduce the number of trainable parameters compared to existing deep learning methods to improve generalizability in noisy data such as EEG. More importantly, we show that this reduction in parameters does not affect performance and in fact the trained network generalizes better for data from some participants. We show our results on two datasets, one publicly available from BCI Competition IV, dataset 2a and another in-house motor imagery dataset.

The common spatial pattern (CSP) is a popular method in feature extraction for motor imagery (MI) electroencephalogram (EEG) classification in brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. However, combining temporal and spectral information in the CSP-based spatial features is still a challenging issue, which greatly affects the performance of MI-based BCI systems. Here, we propose a novel circulant singular spectrum analysis embedded CSP (CiSSA-CSP) method for learning the optimal time-frequency-spatial features to improve the MI classification accuracy. Specifically, raw EEG data are first segmented into multiple time segments and spectrum-specific sub-bands are further derived by CiSSA from each time segment in a set of non-overlapping filter bands. CSP features extracted from all time-frequency segments contain more sufficient time-frequency-spatial information. An experimental study was implemented on the publicly available EEG dataset (BCI Competition III dataset IVa) and a self-collected experimental EEG dataset to validate the effectiveness of the CiSSA-CSP method. Experimental results demonstrate that discriminative and robust features are extracted effectively. Compared with several state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method exhibited optimal accuracies of 96.6% and 95.2% on the public and experimental datasets, respectively, which confirms that it is a promising method for improving the performance of MI-based BCIs.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) systems create a novel communication channel from the brain to an output device bypassing conventional motor output pathways of nerves and muscles. Modern BCI technology is essentially based on techniques for the classification of single-trial brain signals. With respect to the topographic patterns of brainrhythm modulations, the common spatial patterns (CSPs) algorithm has been proven to be very useful to producesubject-specific and discriminative spatial filters; but it didn't consider temporal structures of event-related potentials which may be very important for single-trial EEG classification. In this paper, we propose a new framework offeature extraction for classification of hand movement imagery EEG. Computer simulations on real experimental dataindicate that independent residual analysis (IRA) method can provide efficient temporal features. Combining IRAfeatures with the CSP method, we obtain the optimal spatial and temporal features with which we achieve the bestclassification rate. The high classification rate indicates that the proposed method is promising for an EEG-basedbrain-computer interface.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) systems establish a direct communication channel from the brain to an output device. As the basis of BCIs, recognizing motor imagery activities poses a considerable challenge to signal processing due to the complex and non-stationary characteristics. This paper introduces an optimal and intelligent method for motor imagery BCIs. Because of the robustness to noise, wavelet packet decomposition and common spatial pattern (CSP) methods were implemented to reduce the dimensions of preprocessed signals. And a novel and efficient classifier projection extreme learning machine (PELM) was employed to recognize the labels of electroencephalogram signals. Experiments have been performed on the BCI Competition Dataset to demonstrate the superiority of wavelet-CSP in BCI and the outperformance of the PELM-based method. Results show that the average recognition rate of PELM approaches approximately 70%, while the optimal rate of other methods is 72%, whose training time and classification time are relatively longer as 11.00 ms and 11.66 ms, respectively, compared with 4.75 ms and 4.87 ms obtained by using the proposed BCI system.

Devising a reliable method for implementing brain computer interface (BCI) systems using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is proposed. Applicability of two modal decomposition methods, variational mode decomposition (VMD) and empirical wavelet transform (EWT) on EEG signals for identifying the four different motor imaginary movements by the investigation of event-related desynchronisation (ERD) activity in the Mu-beta rhythm of EEG signals is analysed and compared. The EEG signals from each electrode corresponding to the sensorimotor cortex area of the brain are decomposed using VMD and EWT methods. Each decomposed modes are modelled using auto regressive (AR) modeling and feature vector is formed using the AR model parameters. On classification, better accuracy is perceived for VMD method in comparison with EWT and common spatial pattern (CSP) methods developed on the same dataset.

Multimodal collaborative BCI system based on the improved CSP feature extraction algorithm

Brain computer interface (BCI) is known as a good way to communicate between brain and computer or other device. There are many kinds of physiological signal can operate BCI systems. Motor imagery (MI) has been demonstrated to be a good way to operate a BCI system. In some recent studies about MI based BCI systems, low accuracy rate and time consuming are common problems. In this thesis, a novel motor imagery algorithm is proposed to improve the accuracy rate and computational efficiency at the same time. The architecture of many BCI system is quite complex and they involve time consuming processing. The electroencephalography (EEG) signal is the most commonly used inputs for BCI applications but EEG is often contaminated with noise. To overcome such drawbacks, in this paper we use the common spatial pattern (CSP) for feature extraction from EEG and the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for motor imagery classification. In this study, CSP and LDA have been used to reduce the artifact and classify Mi-based EEG signal. We have used two-level cross validation scheme to determine the subject specific best time window and number of CSP features. We have compared the performance of our system with BCI competition results. This novel algorithm with high accuracy rate and efficiency can be applied to real time BCI system in real-life applications.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) systems based on spontaneous electroencephalography (EEG) hold the promise to implement human voluntary control of lower-extremity powered exoskeletons. However, current EEG-BCI paradigms do not consider the cooperation of upper and lower limbs during walking, which is inconsistent with natural human stepping patterns. To deal with this problem, this study proposed a stepping-matched human EEG-BCI paradigm that involved actions of both unilateral lower and contralateral upper limbs (also referred to as compound-limbs movement). Experiments were conducted in motor execution (ME) and motor imagery (MI) conditions to validate the feasibility. Common spatial pattern (CSP) proposed subject-specific CSP (SSCSP), and filter-bank CSP (FBCSP) methods were applied for feature extraction, respectively. The best average classification results based on SSCSP indicated that the accuracies of compound-limbs paradigms in ME and MI conditions achieved 89.02% ± 12.84% and 73.70% ± 12.47%, respectively. Although they were 2.03% and 5.68% lower than those of the single-upper-limb mode that does not match human stepping patterns, they were 24.30% and 11.02% higher than those of the single-lower-limb mode. These findings indicated that the proposed compound-limbs EEG-BCI paradigm is feasible for decoding human stepping intention and thus provides a potential way for natural human control of walking assistance devices.

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