Recently, substantial progress has been made in the area of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) using modern machine learning techniques to decode and interpret brain signals. While Electroencephalography (EEG) has provided a non-invasive method of interfacing with a human brain, the acquired data is often heavily subject and session dependent. This makes seamless incorporation of such data into real-world applications intractable as the subject and session data variance can lead to long and tedious calibration requirements and cross-subject generalisation issues. Focusing on a Steady State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP) classification systems, we propose a novel means of generating highly-realistic synthetic EEG data invariant to any subject, session or other environmental conditions. Our approach, entitled the Subject Invariant SSVEP Generative Adversarial Network (SIS-GAN), produces synthetic EEG data from multiple SSVEP classes using a single network. Additionally, by taking advantage of a fixed-weight pre-trained subject classification network, we ensure that our generative model remains agnostic to subject-specific features and thus produces subject-invariant data that can be applied to new previously unseen subjects. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of our synthetic data, leading to superior performance, with improvements of up to 16 percentage points in zero-calibration classification tasks when trained using our subject-invariant synthetic EEG signals.
Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) based on motor imagery translate mental motor images recognized from the electroencephalogram (EEG) to control commands. EEG patterns of different imagination tasks, e.g. hand and foot movements, are effectively classified with machine learning techniques using band power features. Recently, also Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that learn both effective features and classifiers simultaneously from raw EEG data have been applied. However, CNNs have two major drawbacks: (i) they have a very large number of parameters, which thus requires a very large number o…
We present a mobile dataset obtained from electroencephalography (EEG) of the scalp and around the ear as well as from locomotion sensors by 24 participants moving at four different speeds while performing two brain-computer interface (BCI) tasks. The data were collected from 32-channel scalp-EEG, 14-channel ear-EEG, 4-channel electrooculography, and 9-channel inertial measurement units placed at the forehead, left ankle, and right ankle. The recording conditions were as follows: standing, slow walking, fast walking, and slight running at speeds of 0, 0.8, 1.6, and 2.0m/s, respectively. For ea…
Brain computer interface (BCI) is the only way for some special patients to communicate with the outside world and provide a direct control channel between brain and the external devices. As a non-invasive interface, the scalp electroencephalography (EEG) has a significant potential to be a major input signal for future BCI systems. Traditional methods only focus on a particular feature in the EEG signal, which limits the practical applications of EEG-based BCI. In this paper, we propose a algorithm for EEG classification with the ability to fuse multiple features. First, use the common spatia…
Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is an essential mechanism that interprets the human brain signal. It provides an assistive technology that enables persons with motor disabilities to communicate with the world and also empowers them to lead independent lives. The common BCI devices use Electroencephalography (EEG) electrical activity recorded from the scalp. EEG signals are noisy owing to the presence of many artifacts, namely, eye blink, head movement, and jaw movement. Such artifacts corrupt the EEG signal and make EEG analysis challenging. This issue is addressed by locating the artifacts and…
A brain-computer interface (BCI) is used not only to control external devices for healthy people but also to rehabilitate motor functions for motor-disabled patients. Decoding movement intention is one of the most significant aspects for performing arm movement tasks using brain signals. Decoding movement execution (ME) from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have shown high performance in previous works, however movement imagination (MI) paradigm-based intention decoding has so far failed to achieve sufficient accuracy. In this study, we focused on a robust MI decoding method with transfer le…
Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica（国家天体物理、光学与电子学研究所）
An asynchronous Brain--Computer Interface (BCI) based on imagined speech is a tool that allows to control an external device or to emit a message at the moment the user desires to by decoding EEG signals of imagined speech. In order to correctly implement these types of BCI, we must be able to detect from a continuous signal, when the subject starts to imagine words. In this work, five methods of feature extraction based on wavelet decomposition, empirical mode decomposition, frequency energies, fractal dimension and chaos theory features are presented to solve the task of detecting imagined w…
Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning to predict cognitive tasks from electroencephalography (EEG) signals has been a fast-developing area in Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, data collection and analysis could be more challenging. The remote experiment during the pandemic yields several challenges, and we discuss the possible solutions. This paper explores machine learning algorithms that can run efficiently on personal computers for BCI classification tasks. The results show that Random Forest and RBF SVM perform well for EEG classification tasks. Fur…
University of Tasmania, Australia（塔斯马尼亚大学）；Macquarie University, Australia（麦考瑞大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China（电子科技大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China（华中科技大学）；University of California, San Diego, USA（加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校）；University of Technology Sydney, Australia（悉尼科技大学）
Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a powerful communication tool between users and systems, which enhances the capability of the human brain in communicating and interacting with the environment directly. Advances in neuroscience and computer science in the past decades have led to exciting developments in BCI, thereby making BCI a top interdisciplinary research area in computational neuroscience and intelligence. Recent technological advances such as wearable sensing devices, real-time data streaming, machine learning, and deep learning approaches have increased interest in electroencephalogra…
Brain computer interfaces (BCI) using EEG, fNIRS and body motion (MoCap) data are getting more attention due to the fact that fNIRS and MoCap are not prone to movement artifacts similar to other brain imaging techniques such as EEG. Advancements in deep learning (neural networks) would allow the use of raw data for efficient feature extraction without any pre-/post-processing. In this work, we are performing human activity recognition (BCI classification task) for 5 activity classes using an end-to-end (deep) neural network (NN) (from input all the way to the output) on raw fNIRS, EEG and MoCa…
Decoding of motor imagery (MI) from Electroencephalogram (EEG) is an important component of the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) system that helps motor-disabled people interact with the outside world via external devices. The main issue in developing the EEG based BCI is the informative confusion due to the non-stationary characteristics of EEG data. In this work, an innovative idea of transforming an EEG signal into the weight vector of an unsupervised neural network called the autoencoder is proposed for the first time to solve that problem. Separate autoencoders are trained for the individua…
University of Milano-Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学）；NeuroMI, Milan Center for Neuroscience（米兰神经科学中心（NeuroMI））；University of Vic-Central University of Catalonia（维克大学-加泰罗尼亚中央大学）
The ageing process may lead to cognitive and physical impairments, which may affect elderly everyday life. In recent years, the use of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) based on Electroencephalography (EEG) has revealed to be particularly effective to promote and enhance rehabilitation procedures, especially by exploiting motor imagery experimental paradigms. Moreover, BCIs seem to increase patients' engagement and have proved to be reliable tools for elderly overall wellness improvement. However, EEG signals usually present a low signal-to-noise ratio and can be recorded for a limited time. Th…
Nowadays, Brain Computer Interface has an important role in the life quality of parallelized people. However, this technique is mainly affected by the quality of the recorded signal in each trial. This problem could be solved by rejecting low-quality trials. But developing the processing based on the recorded signal from the brain, which is a mixture of the target signal plus noise and artifact, would not be favorable in situations that all trials have low quality. This paper solves this problem by presenting a new fast algorithm for separating recorded source signals. Results indicate the imp…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Bayreuth（拜罗伊特大学）
Deep learning has been successful in BCI decoding. However, it is very data-hungry and requires pooling data from multiple sources. EEG data from various sources decrease the decoding performance due to negative transfer. Recently, transfer learning for EEG decoding has been suggested as a remedy and become subject to recent BCI competitions (e.g. BEETL), but there are two complications in combining data from many subjects. First, privacy is not protected as highly personal brain data needs to be shared (and copied across increasingly tight information governance boundaries). Moreover, BCI dat…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Machine learning has achieved great success in many applications, including electroencephalogram (EEG) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Unfortunately, many machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are crafted by adding deliberately designed perturbations to the original inputs. Many adversarial attack approaches for classification problems have been proposed, but few have considered target adversarial attacks for regression problems. This paper proposes two such approaches. More specifically, we consider white-box target attacks for regression problems, wher…
Università di Pisa（比萨大学）；CAMLIN Italy s.r.l.（CAMLIN意大利有限公司）
Typical EEG-based BCI applications require the computation of complex functions over the noisy EEG channels to be carried out in an efficient way. Deep learning algorithms are capable of learning flexible nonlinear functions directly from data, and their constant processing latency is perfect for their deployment into online BCI systems. However, it is crucial for the jitter of the processing system to be as low as possible, in order to avoid unpredictable behaviour that can ruin the system's overall usability. In this paper, we present a novel encoding method, based on on deep convolutional a…
Most EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) require a considerable amount of training data to calibrate the classification model, owing to the high variability in the EEG data, which manifests itself between participants, but also within participants from session to session (and, of course, from trial to trial). In general, the more complex the model, the more data for training is needed. We suggest a novel technique for augmenting the training data by generating new data from the data set at hand. Different from existing techniques, our method uses backward and forward projection using so…
Decoding brain signals has gained many attention and has found much applications in recent years such as Brain Computer Interfaces, communicating with controlling external devices using the user's intentions, occupies an emerging field with the potential of changing the world, with diverse applications from rehabilitation to human augmentation. This being said brain signal analysis, EEG brain signal analysis in particular, is a challenging task. With the advances and achievements in the field of deep learning in problem solving with using only raw data, few attempts has been carried in recent …
In the context of a Brain Computer Interface platform implemented for the arm rehabilitation of mildly impaired stroke patients, two methods of EEG signals processing are compared in terms of (i) their identification performance rate and (ii) their computational complexity with the overall goal to select the most efficient and feasible real-time procedure. An effective signal processing is, indeed, one of the most critical issue for such kind of technology which aims to establish a real-time communication between the subject's brain and a machine, i.e. a computer, a robotic arm or another devi…
Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) enable converting the brain electrical activity of an interface user to the user commands. BCI research studies demonstrated encouraging results in different areas such as neurorehabilitation, control of artificial limbs, control of computer environments, communication and detection of diseases. Most of BCIs use scalp-electroencephalography (EEG), which is a non-invasive method to capture the brain activity. Although EEG monitoring devices are available in the market, these devices are generally lab-oriented and expensive. Day-to-day use of BCIs is impractical …
Detecting the salient parts of motor-imagery electroencephalogram (MI-EEG) signals can enhance the performance of the brain-computer interface (BCI) system and reduce the computational burden required for processing lengthy MI-EEG signals. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method based on the self-attention mechanism to detect the salient intervals of MI-EEG signals automatically. Our suggested method can be used as a preprocessing step within any BCI algorithm to enhance its performance. The effectiveness of the suggested method is evaluated on the most widely used BCI algorithm, the …
Recent advances in deep learning have had a methodological and practical impact on brain-computer interface research. Among the various deep network architectures, convolutional neural networks have been well suited for spatio-spectral-temporal electroencephalogram signal representation learning. Most of the existing CNN-based methods described in the literature extract features at a sequential level of abstraction with repetitive nonlinear operations and involve densely connected layers for classification. However, studies in neurophysiology have revealed that EEG signals carry information in…
A brain-computer interface (BCI) based on the motor imagery (MI) paradigm translates one's motor intention into a control signal by classifying the Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal of different tasks. However, most existing systems either (i) use a high-quality algorithm to train the data off-line and run only classification in real-time, since the off-line algorithm is too slow, or (ii) use low-quality heuristics that are sufficiently fast for real-time training but introduces relatively large classification error. In this work, we propose a novel processing pipeline that allows real-time an…
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Handong Global University（韩东国际大学）
Classification of EEG-based motor imagery (MI) is a crucial non-invasive application in brain-computer interface (BCI) research. This paper proposes a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for accurate and robust EEG-based MI classification that outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The proposed CNN model, namely EEG-Inception, is built on the backbone of the Inception-Time network, which showed to be highly efficient and accurate for time-series classification. Also, the proposed network is an end-to-end classification, as it takes the raw EEG signals as the input and does…
Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) system provides a pathway between humans and the outside world by analyzing brain signals which contain potential neural information. Electroencephalography (EEG) is one of most commonly used brain signals and EEG recognition is an important part of BCI system. Recently, convolutional neural networks (ConvNet) in deep learning are becoming the new cutting edge tools to tackle the problem of EEG recognition. However, training an effective deep learning model requires a big number of data, which limits the application of EEG datasets with a small number of samples.…
The brain computer interface (BCI) systems are utilized for transferring information among humans and computers by analyzing electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings.The process of mentally previewing a motor movement without generating the corporal output can be described as motor imagery (MI).In this emerging research field, the number of commands is also limited in relation to the number of MI tasks; in the current literature, mostly two or four commands (classes) are studied. As a solution to this problem, it is recommended to use mental tasks as well as MI tasks. Unfortunately, the use of th…
There are several protocols in the Electroencephalography (EEG) recording scenarios which produce various types of event-related potentials (ERP). P300 pattern is a well-known ERP which produced by auditory and visual oddball paradigm and BCI speller system. In this study, P300 and non-P300 separability are investigated in two scenarios including image recognition paradigm and BCI speller. Image recognition scenario is an experiment that examines the participants, knowledge about an image that shown to them before by analyzing the EEG signal recorded during the observing of that image as visua…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
A brain-computer interface (BCI) enables a user to communicate with a computer directly using brain signals. The most common non-invasive BCI modality, electroencephalogram (EEG), is sensitive to noise/artifact and suffers between-subject/within-subject non-stationarity. Therefore, it is difficult to build a generic pattern recognition model in an EEG-based BCI system that is optimal for different subjects, during different sessions, for different devices and tasks. Usually, a calibration session is needed to collect some training data for a new subject, which is time-consuming and user unfrie…
Electroencephalogram (EEG) based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems are useful tools for clinical purposes like neural prostheses. In this study, we collected EEG signals related to grasp motions. Five healthy subjects participated in this experiment. They executed and imagined five sustained-grasp actions. We proposed a novel data augmentation method that increases the amount of training data using labels obtained from electromyogram (EMG) signals analysis. For implementation, we recorded EEG and EMG simultaneously. The data augmentation over the original EEG data concluded higher classif…
We introduce here the idea of Meta-Learning for training EEG BCI decoders. Meta-Learning is a way of training machine learning systems so they learn to learn. We apply here meta-learning to a simple Deep Learning BCI architecture and compare it to transfer learning on the same architecture. Our Meta-learning strategy operates by finding optimal parameters for the BCI decoder so that it can quickly generalise between different users and recording sessions -- thereby also generalising to new users or new sessions quickly. We tested our algorithm on the Physionet EEG motor imagery dataset. Our ap…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Zürich University of Applied Sciences（苏黎世应用科技大学）
An electroencephalogram (EEG) based brain-computer interface (BCI) speller allows a user to input text to a computer by thought. It is particularly useful to severely disabled individuals, e.g., amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients, who have no other effective means of communication with another person or a computer. Most studies so far focused on making EEG-based BCI spellers faster and more reliable; however, few have considered their security. This study, for the first time, shows that P300 and steady-state visual evoked potential BCI spellers are very vulnerable, i.e., they can be severe…
Developments in Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are empowering those with severe physical afflictions through their use in assistive systems. Common methods of achieving this is via Motor Imagery (MI), which maps brain signals to code for certain commands. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is preferred for recording brain signal data on account of it being non-invasive. Despite their potential utility, MI-BCI systems are yet confined to research labs. A major cause for this is lack of robustness of such systems. As hypothesized by two teams during Cybathlon 2016, a particular source of the system's …
Channel Reflection: Knowledge-Driven Data Augmentation for EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Shenzhen Huazhong University of Science and Technology Research Institute（华中科技大学深圳研究院）；China Electronic System Technology Co., Ltd.（中国电子系统技术有限公司）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学人工智能与自动化学院）；School of Civil and Hydraulic Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学土木与水利工程学院）
Currently, strokes are the leading cause of adult disability in the United States. Traditional treatment and rehabilitation options such as physical therapy and tissue plasminogen activator are limited in their effectiveness and ability to restore mobility and function to the patient. As a result, there exists an opportunity to greatly improve the treatment for strokes. Machine learning, specifically techniques that utilize Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) to help the patient either restore neurologic pathways or effectively communicate with an electronic prosthetic, show promising results whe…
