An adaptive filter bank for motor imagery based Brain Computer Interface

Abstract

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) provides an alternative communication and control method for people with severe motor disabilities. Motor imagery patterns are widely used in Electroencephalogram (EEG) based BCIs. These motor imagery activities are associated with variation in alpha and beta band power of EEG signals called Event Related Desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS). The dominant frequency bands are subject-specific and therefore performance of motor imagery based BCIs are sensitive to both temporal filtering and spatial filtering. As the optimum filter is strongly subject-dependent, we propose a method that selects the subject-specific discriminative frequency components using time-frequency plots of Fisher ratio of two-class motor imagery patterns. We also propose a low complexity adaptive Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter bank system based on coefficient decimation technique which can realize the subject-specific bandpass filters adaptively depending on the information of Fisher ratio map. Features are extracted only from the selected frequency components. The proposed adaptive filter bank based system offers average classification accuracy of about 90%, which is slightly better than the existing fixed filter bank system.