Multi-view brain functional connectivity and hierarchical fusion for EEG-based emotion recognition

Abstract

Emotional states evolve gradually from their onset to full manifestation, reflected in changes in brain functional connectivity. Existing research often focuses only on the final emotional state, missing the rich, dynamic information of emotional evolution. This paper proposes a novel network framework leveraging global and local brain functional connectivity through a multi-view approach. We introduce a global and local connectivity modeling method using electroencephalogram signals to simulate brain connectivity changes across time and specific moments. A residual-based local detail feature extractor combined with a coordinate attention module captures long-range dependencies and maintains positional accuracy. A global feature extractor is also designed for the effective extraction of emotional information. Finally, a hierarchical multi-scale cross-attention feature fusion module integrates features across different levels to enhance emotion recognition performance and robustness. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets demonstrate the framework’s superiority and generalization capability.