Subject-Specific Sinusoid Approach for A Brain-Computer Interface Based on Single-Channel Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential

Abstract

The aim of brain–computer interface (BCI) is to support the daily life of individuals with severe disabilities. For practical BCI, ease of use is one of the most important factors, which is enhanced when fewer electrodes are used. However, using fewer electrode affect the performance of BCI negatively. In this study, a novel single-channel steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) detection method with subject-specific sinusoids approach (SSSA) was developed to enhance the performance of single channel SSVEP based BCI, therefore, to assist the ease of use. For the SSSA, subject-specific sinusoids were defined from training data based on SSVEP frequency and phase features. To detect the SSVEP response, defined sinusoids were used as reference. To evaluate the detection performance of the developed method, it was compared with the well-known power spectral density analysis (PSDA), least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and advanced canonical correlation analysis (CCA) methods on a benchmark dataset. The experimental results showed significantly greater detection accuracy and information transfer rate (ITR) with the SSSA method compared to the PSDA, LASSO and advanced CCA methods. And it is worth to noting that subject-specific sinusoids better represent SSVEP response than template signals that used in advanced CCA. Also proposed method reached one of the highest ITRs reported with max 125 and average 81 bits/min ITRs for single-channel SSVEP based BCI.