Detection of SSVEP based on empirical mode decomposition and power spectrum peaks analysis

Abstract

Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) based brain–computer interfaces have been widely studied because these systems have potential to restore capabilities of communication and control of disable people. Identifying target frequency using SSVEP signals is still a great challenge due to the poor signal-to-noise ratio of these signals. Commonly, this task is carried out with detection algorithms such as bank of frequency-selective filters and canonical correlation analysis. This work proposes a novel method for the detection of SSVEP that combines the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and a power spectral peak analysis (PSPA). The proposed EMD+PSPA method was evaluated with two EEG datasets, and was compared with the widely used FB and CCA. The first dataset is freely available and consists of three flickering light sources; the second dataset was constructed and consists of six flickering light sources. The results showed that proposed method was able to detect SSVEP with high accuracy (93.67±9.97 and 78.19±23.20 for the two datasets). Furthermore, the detection accuracy results achieved with the first dataset showed that EMD+PSPA provided the highest detection accuracy (DA) in the largest number of participants (three out of five), and that the average DA across all participant was 93.67±9.97 which is 7% and 4% more than the average DA achieved with FB and CCA, respectively.