IMPLEMENTATION OF EEG SIGNAL PROCESSING AND DECODING FOR TWO-CLASS MOTOR IMAGERY DATA

Abstract

This work decodes two-class motor imagery (MI) based on four main processing steps: (i) Raw electroencephalographic (EEG) signal is decomposed to single trials and spatial filters are estimated for each trial by common spatial filtering (CSP) method; (ii) features are extracted by taking the log transformation (normal distribution) of the spatially filtered EEG signal; (iii) optimal channel selection algorithm is proposed to reduce the number of EEG channels, such approach is regarded as key technological advantage in the implementation of brain–computer interface (BCI) to reduce the system processing time; (iv) finally, support vector machine (SVM) is employed to discriminate two classes of left and right hand MI. Two variations of SVM were proposed: polynomial function kernel and radial-based function RBF kernel. The results revealed that CSP succeeded in removing the strong correlation bound between the EEG samples by maximizing the variance of class 2 samples while minimizing the variance of class 1 samples. The channel selection algorithm achieved its goal to reduce the data dimension by selecting two channels out of three having the lowest variance entropies of 0.239 and 0.261 for channel 1 and channel 2, respectively. The features vector was divided into 80% train and 20% test with five-fold cross validation. The classification performance of SVM-polynomial kernel was 87.86% while it is 95.72% for SVM-RBF kernel as average accuracy of five-folds for both. Thus SVM-RBF is superior to SVM-Poly in the proposed framework.