Single Trial Estimation of Peak Latency and Amplitude of Multiple Correlated ERP Components

Abstract

Event related potentials (ERPs) are conventionally extracted by averaging EEG signals over many trials but some characteristics of these signals are lost as a result. Recently single-trial ERP extraction has become one of the main research areas in neuroscience. Spatiotemporal filtering method which uses more than one channel is one of these extraction methods. A modified spatiotemporal filtering method is proposed here for single-trial estimation of correlated ERP component parameters (peak latency and peak amplitude). The error of this method in extracting the peak amplitude and peak latency of ERP components is less than 10% and changing the temporal correlation coefficient of the main ERP components, does not change the results notably. Our proposed method for peak amplitude and peak latency estimation is proved to be better than other reported methods (especially for peak amplitude estimation) and has less computational cost in comparison with other spatiotemporal methods. The ability of our method to generalize to any number of correlated ERP components is one of the key points in our work.