A Computationally Efficient Multiclass Time-Frequency Common Spatial Pattern Analysis on EEG Motor Imagery

Common spatial pattern (CSP) is a popular feature extraction method for electroencephalogram (EEG) motor imagery (MI). This study modifies the conventional CSP algorithm to improve the multi-class MI classification accuracy and ensure the computation process is efficient. The EEG MI data is gathered from the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Competition IV. At first, a bandpass filter and a timefrequency analysis are performed for each experiment trial. Then, the optimal EEG signals for every experiment trials are selected based on the signal energy for CSP feature extraction. In the end, the extracted features are classified by three classifiers, linear discriminant analysis (LDA), naïve Bayes (NVB), and support vector machine (SVM), in parallel for classification accuracy comparison.The experiment results show the proposed algorithm average computation time is 37.22% less than the FBCSP (1^st winner in the BCI Competition IV) and 4.98% longer than the conventional CSP method. For the classification rate, the proposed algorithm kappa value achieved 2nd highest compared with the top 3 winners in BCI Competition IV.

I. Introduction

EEG is one of the most popular brain signal acquisition tools because of its non-invasive and low-cost characteristics [1]. As signal processing methods and machine learning techniques improve, the applications of EEG-based BCI become more realistic and viable. Currently, EEG-based BCI prototypes are widely explored in the human motor recovery research area.