Testing the Self-Similarity Exponent to Feature Extraction in Motor Imagery Based Brain Computer Interface Systems

Abstract

A Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system is a tool not requiring any muscle action to transmit information. Acquisition, preprocessing, feature extraction (FE), and classification of electroencephalograph (EEG) signals constitute the main steps of a motor imagery BCI. Among them, FE becomes crucial for BCI, since the underlying EEG knowledge must be properly extracted into a feature vector. Linear approaches have been widely applied to FE in BCI, whereas nonlinear tools are not so common in literature. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to check whether some Hurst exponent and fractal dimension based estimators become valid indicators to FE in motor imagery BCI. The final results obtained were not optimal as expected, which may be due to the fact that the nature of the analyzed EEG signals in these motor imagery tasks were not self-similar enough.