Classification of EEG Signals Based on Filter Bank and Sparse Representation in Motor Imagery Brain-Computer Interfaces

Abstract

To improve the classification performance of motor imagery (MI) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), a new signal processing algorithm for classifying electroencephalogram (EEG) signals by combining filter bank and sparse representation is proposed. The broadband EEG signals of 8–30[Formula: see text]Hz are segmented into 10 sub-band signals using a filter bank. EEG signals in each sub-band are spatially filtered by common spatial pattern (CSP). Fisher score combined with grid search is used for selecting the optimal sub-band, the band power of which is employed for designing a dictionary matrix. A testing signal can be sparsely represented as a linear combination of some columns of the dictionary. The sparse coefficients are estimated by [Formula: see text] norm optimization, and the residuals of sparse coefficients are exploited for classification. The proposed classification algorithm was applied to two BCI datasets and compared with two traditional broadband CSP-based algorithms. The results showed that the proposed algorithm provided superior classification accuracies, which were better than those yielded by traditional algorithms, verifying the efficacy of the present algorithm.