Boosting template-based SSVEP decoding by cross-domain transfer learning

SSVEP-DAN: Cross-Domain Data Alignment for SSVEP-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces

Steady-state visual-evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a non-invasive means of communication through high-speed speller systems. However, their efficiency is highly dependent on individual training data acquired during time-consuming calibration sessions. To address the challenge of data insufficiency in SSVEP-based BCIs, we introduce SSVEP-DAN, the first dedicated neural network model designed to align SSVEP data across different domains, encompassing various sessions, subjects, or devices. Our experimental results demonstrate the ability of SSVEP-DAN to transform existing source SSVEP data into supplementary calibration data. This results in a significant improvement in SSVEP decoding accuracy while reducing the calibration time. We envision SSVEP-DAN playing a crucial role in future applications of high-performance SSVEP-based BCIs. The source code for this work is available at: https://github.com/CECNL/SSVEP-DAN.

A Time-Local Weighted Transformation Recognition Framework for Steady State Visual Evoked Potentials Based Brain-Computer Interfaces

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA), Multivariate synchronization index (MSI), and their extended methods have been widely used for target recognition in Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on Steady State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEP), and covariance calculation is an important process for these algorithms. Some studies have proved that embedding time-local information into the covariance can optimize the recognition effect of the above algorithms. However, the optimization effect can only be observed from the recognition results and the improvement principle of time-local information cannot be explained. Therefore, we propose a time-local weighted transformation (TT) recognition framework that directly embeds the time-local information into the electroencephalography signal through weighted transformation. The influence mechanism of time-local information on the SSVEP signal can then be observed in the frequency domain. Low-frequency noise is suppressed on the premise of sacrificing part of the SSVEP fundamental frequency energy, the harmonic energy of SSVEP is enhanced at the cost of introducing a small amount of high-frequency noise. The experimental results show that the TT recognition framework can significantly improve the recognition ability of the algorithms and the separability of extracted features. Its enhancement effect is significantly better than the traditional time-local covariance extraction method, which has enormous application potential.

Multi-Stimulus Least-Squares Transformation With Online Adaptation Scheme to Reduce Calibration Effort for SSVEP-Based BCIs

Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP), one of the most popular electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigms, can achieve high performance using calibration-based recognition algorithms. As calibration-based recognition algorithms are time-consuming to collect calibration data, the least-squares transformation (LST) has been used to reduce the calibration effort for SSVEP-based BCI. However, the transformation matrices constructed by current LST methods are not precise enough, resulting in large differences between the transformed data and the real data of the target subject. This ultimately leads to the constructed spatial filters and reference templates not being effective enough. To address these issues, this paper proposes multi-stimulus LST with online adaptation scheme (ms-LST-OA).

METHODS

The proposed ms-LST-OA consists of two parts. Firstly, to improve the precision of the transformation matrices, we propose the multi-stimulus LST (ms-LST) using cross-stimulus learning scheme as the cross-subject data transformation method. The ms-LST uses the data from neighboring stimuli to construct a higher precision transformation matrix for each stimulus to reduce the differences between transformed data and real data. Secondly, to further optimize the constructed spatial filters and reference templates, we use an online adaptation scheme to learn more features of the EEG signals of the target subject through an iterative process trial-by-trial.

RESULTS

ms-LST-OA performance was measured for three datasets (Benchmark Dataset, BETA Dataset, and UCSD Dataset). Using few calibration data, the ITR of ms-LST-OA achieved 210.01±10.10 bits/min, 172.31±7.26 bits/min, and 139.04±14.90 bits/min for all three datasets, respectively.

CONCLUSION

Using ms-LST-OA can reduce calibration effort for SSVEP-based BCIs.

MetaBCI: An open-source platform for brain-computer interfaces

BACKGROUND

Recently, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have attracted worldwide attention for their great potential in clinical and real-life applications. To implement a complete BCI system, one must set up several links to translate the brain intent into computer commands. However, there is not an open-source software platform that can cover all links of the BCI chain.

METHOD

This study developed a one-stop open-source BCI software, namely MetaBCI, to facilitate the construction of a BCI system. MetaBCI is written in Python, and has the functions of stimulus presentation (Brainstim), data loading and processing (Brainda), and online information flow (Brainflow). This paper introduces the detailed information of MetaBCI and presents four typical application cases.

RESULTS

The results showed that MetaBCI was an extensible and feature-rich software platform for BCI research and application, which could effectively encode, decode, and feedback brain activities.

CONCLUSIONS

MetaBCI can greatly lower the BCI's technical threshold for BCI beginners and can save time and cost to build up a practical BCI system. The source code is available at https://github.com/TBC-TJU/MetaBCI, expecting new contributions from the BCI community.

Filter bank second-order underdamped stochastic resonance analysis for implementing a short-term high-speed SSVEP detection

OBJECTIVE

The progression of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) has been propelled by breakthroughs in neuroscience, signal processing, and machine learning, marking it as a dynamic field of study over the past few decades. Nevertheless, the nonlinear and non-stationary characteristics of steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), coupled with the incongruity between frequently employed linear techniques and nonlinear signal attributes, resulted in the subpar performance of mainstream non-training algorithms like canonical correlation analysis (CCA), multivariate synchronization index (MSI), and filter bank CCA (FBCCA) in short-term SSVEP detection.

METHODS

To tackle this problem, the novel fusions of common filter bank analysis, CCA dimensionality reduction methods, USSR models, and MSI recognition models are used in SSVEP signal recognition.

RESULTS

Unlike conventional linear techniques such as CCA, MSI, and FBCCA, the filter bank second-order underdamped stochastic resonance (FBUSSR) analysis demonstrates superior efficacy in the detection of short-term high-speed SSVEPs.

CONCLUSION

This research enlists 32 subjects and uses a public dataset to assess the proposed approach, and the experimental outcomes indicate that the non-training method can attain greater recognition precision and stability. Furthermore, under the conditions of the newly proposed fusion method and light stimulation, the USSR model exhibits the most optimal enhancement effect.

SIGNIFICANCE

The findings of this study underscore the expansive potential for the application of BCI systems in the realm of neuroscience and signal processing.

Almost free of calibration for SSVEP-based brain-computer interfaces

Objective. Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) is a promising technology that can achieve high information transfer rate (ITR) with supervised algorithms such as ensemble task-related component analysis (eTRCA) and task-discriminant component analysis (TDCA). However, training individual models requires a tedious and time-consuming calibration process, which hinders the real-life use of SSVEP-BCIs. A recent data augmentation method, called source aliasing matrix estimation (SAME), can generate new EEG samples from a few calibration trials. But SAME does not exploit the information across stimuli as well as only reduces the number of calibration trials per command, so it still has some limitations.Approach. This study proposes an extended version of SAME, called multi-stimulus SAME (msSAME), which exploits the similarity of the aliasing matrix across frequencies to enhance the performance of SSVEP-BCI with insufficient calibration trials. We also propose a semi-supervised approach based on msSAME that can further reduce the number of SSVEP frequencies needed for calibration. We evaluate our method on two public datasets, Benchmark and BETA, and an online experiment.Main results. The results show that msSAME outperforms SAME for both eTRCA and TDCA on the public datasets. Moreover, the semi-supervised msSAME-based method achieves comparable performance to the fully calibrated methods and outperforms the conventional free-calibrated methods. Remarkably, our method only needs 24 s to calibrate 40 targets in the online experiment and achieves an average ITR of 213.8 bits min-1with a peak of 242.6 bits min-1.Significance. This study significantly reduces the calibration effort for individual SSVEP-BCIs, which is beneficial for developing practical plug-and-play SSVEP-BCIs.

Cross Domain Correlation Maximization for Enhancing the Target Recognition of SSVEP-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces

The target recognition performance of steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interfaces can be significantly improved with a training-based approach. However, the training procedure is time consuming and often causes fatigue. Consequently, the number of training data should be limited, which may reduce the classification performance. Thus, how to improve classification accuracy without increasing the training time is crucial to SSVEP-based BCI system. This study proposes a transfer-related component analysis (TransRCA) method for addressing the above issue. In this method, the SSVEP-related components are extracted from a small number of training data of the current individual and combined with those extracted from a large number of existing training data of other individuals. The TransRCA method maximizes not only the inter-trial covariances between the source and target subjects, but also the correlation between the reference signals and SSVEP signals from the source and target subjects. The proposed method was validated on the SSVEP public Benchmark and BETA datasets, and the classification accuracy and information transmission rate of the ensemble version of the proposed TransRCA method were compared with those of the state-of-the-art eCCA, eTRCA, ttCCA, LSTeTRCA, and eIISMC methods on both datasets. The comparison results indicate that the proposed method provides a superior performance compared with these state-of-the-art methods, and thus has high potential for the development of a SSVEP-based brain-computer interface system with high classification performance that only uses a small number of training data.

Cross-Subject Transfer Method Based on Domain Generalization for Facilitating Calibration of SSVEP-Based BCIs

In steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), various spatial filtering methods based on individual calibration data have been proposed to alleviate the interference of spontaneous activities in SSVEP signals for enhancing the SSVEP detection performance. However, the time-consuming calibration session would increase the visual fatigue of subjects and reduce the usability of the BCI system. The key idea of this study is to propose a cross-subject transfer method based on domain generalization, which transfers the domain-invariant spatial filters and templates learned from source subjects to the target subject with no access to the EEG data from the target subject. The transferred spatial filters and templates are obtained by maximizing the intra- and inter-subject correlations using the SSVEP data corresponding to the target and its neighboring stimuli. For SSVEP detection of the target subject, four types of correlation coefficients are calculated to construct the feature vector. Experimental results estimated with three SSVEP datasets show that the proposed cross-subject transfer method improves the SSVEP detection performance compared to state-of-art methods. The satisfactory results demonstrate that the proposed method provides an effective transfer learning strategy requiring no tedious data collection process for new users, holding the potential of promoting practical applications of SSVEP-based BCI.

An efficient CNN-LSTM Network with spectral normalization and label smoothing technologies for SSVEP frequency recognition

OBJECTIVE

Steady-state visual evoked potentials(SSVEPs) based braincomputer interface(BCI) has received great interests owing to the high information transfer rate(ITR) and available large number of targets. However, the performance of frequency recognition methods heavily depends on the amount of the calibration data for intra-subject classification. Some research adopted the deep learning(DL) algorithm to conduct the inter-subject classification, which could reduce the calculation procedure, but the performance still has large room to improve compared with the intra-subject classification.

APPROACH

To address these issues, we proposed an efficient SSVEP DL NETwork (termed SSVEPNET) based on 1D convolution and long short-term memory (LSTM) module. To enhance the performance of SSVEPNT, we adopted the spectral normalization and label smoothing technologies during implementing the network architecture. We evaluated the SSVEPNET and compared it with other methods for the intra- and inter-subject classification under different conditions, i.e., two datasets, two time-window lengths (1 s and 0.5 s), three sizes of training data.

MAIN RESULTS

Under all the experimental settings, the proposed SSVEPNET achieved the highest average accuracy for the intra- and inter-subject classification on the two SSVEP datasets, when compared with other traditional and DL baseline methods. Signif icance. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DL model holds promise to enhance frequency recognition performance in SSVEP-based BCIs. Besides, the mixed network structures with CNN and LSTM, and the spectral normalization and label smoothing could be useful optimization strategies to design efficient models for EEG data.

A L1 normalization enhanced dynamic window method for SSVEP-based BCIs

BACKGROUND

Filter bank canonical correlation analysis (FBCCA) has been widely applied to detect the frequency components of steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP). FBCCA with dynamic window (FBCCA-DW) is recently proposed to improve its performance. FBCCA-DW adaptively chooses a proper window length based on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of SSVEP signals. It takes the output of FBCCA to evaluate the SNR of SSVEP signals, by using the softmax function and cost function. In practice, SSVEP signals always contain task-unrelated electroencephalogram (EEG), which degrades the SSVEP task. When the power of task-unrelated EEG changes, there would be an offset in the output of FBCCA. However, due to the insensitivity of softmax function to the offset, the SNR in FBCCA-DW ignores the interference of the task-unrelated EEG. Therefore, FBCCA-DW will analyze SSVEP signals at an inappropriate window length.

NEW METHOD

To solve the issue, we replace the softmax function with the L1 normalization, which could respond a reasonable SNR to the offset. Since the proposed method takes task-unrelated EEG into account, it could choose a more appropriate window length.

RESULTS

We comprehensively validate the proposed method on three publicly available SSVEP datasets. The results indicate that the proposed method could improve the performance significantly.

COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHODS

The proposed method outperforms FBCCA and FBCCA-DW in terms of information transfer rate (ITR).

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed method enhances the correlation between the window length and the credibility of the recognition result. It shows its potential for practical applications in complex environments.

An improved cross-subject spatial filter transfer method for SSVEP-based BCI

Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) training feature recognition algorithms utilize user training data to reduce the interference of spontaneous electroencephalogram (EEG) activities on SSVEP response for improved recognition accuracy. The data collection process can be tedious, increasing the mental fatigue of users and also seriously affecting the practicality of SSVEP-based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. As an alternative, a cross-subject spatial filter transfer (CSSFT) method to transfer an existing user data model with good SSVEP response to new user test data has been proposed. The CSSFT method uses superposition averages of data for multiple blocks of data as transfer data. However, the amplitude and pattern of brain signals are often significantly different across trials. The goal of this study was to improve superposition averaging for the CSSFT method and propose an Ensemble scheme based on ensemble learning, and an Expansion scheme based on matrix expansion. The feature recognition performance was compared for CSSFT and the proposed improved CSSFT method using two public datasets. The results demonstrated that the improved CSSFT method can significantly improve the recognition accuracy and information transmission rate of existing methods. This strategy avoids a tedious data collection process, and promotes the potential practical application of BCI systems.

Cross-subject spatial filter transfer method for SSVEP-EEG feature recognition

Objective.Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) is an important control method of the brain-computer interface (BCI) system. The development of an efficient SSVEP feature decoding algorithm is the core issue in SSVEP-BCI. It has been proposed to use user training data to reduce the spontaneous electroencephalogram activity interference on SSVEP response, thereby improving the feature recognition accuracy of the SSVEP signal. Nevertheless, the tedious data collection process increases the mental fatigue of the user and severely affects the applicability of the BCI system.Approach.A cross-subject spatial filter transfer (CSSFT) method that transfer the existing user model with good SSVEP response to the new user test data without collecting any training data from the new user is proposed.Main results.Experimental results demonstrate that the transfer model increases the distinction of the feature discriminant coefficient between the gaze following target and the non-gaze following target and accurately identifies the wrong target in the fundamental algorithm model. The public datasets show that the CSSFT method significantly increases the recognition performance of canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and filter bank CCA. Additionally, when the data used to calculate the transfer model contains one data block only, the CSSFT method retains its effective feature recognition capabilities.Significance.The proposed method requires no tedious data calibration process for new users, provides an effective technical solution for the transfer of the cross-subject model, and has potential application value for promoting the application of the BCI system.

Online Adaptation Boosts SSVEP-Based BCI Performance

OBJECTIVE

A user-friendly steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) prefers no calibration for its target recognition algorithm, however, the existing calibration-free schemes perform still far behind their calibration-based counterparts. To tackle this issue, learning online from the subject's unlabeled data is investigated as a potential approach to boost the performance of the calibration-free SSVEP-based BCIs.

METHODS

An online adaptation scheme is developed to tune the spatial filters using the online unlabeled data from previous trials, and then developing the online adaptive canonical correlation analysis (OACCA) method.

RESULTS

A simulation study on two public SSVEP datasets (Dataset I and II) with a total of 105 subjects demonstrated that the proposed online adaptation scheme can boost the CCA's averaged information transfer rate (ITR) from 94.60 to 158.87 bits/min in Dataset I and from 85.80 to 123.91 bits/min in Dataset II. Furthermore, in our online experiment it boosted the CCA's ITR from 55.81 bits/min to 95.73 bits/min. More importantly, this online adaptation scheme can be easily combined with any spatial filtering-based algorithms to achieve online learning.

CONCLUSION

By online adaptation, the proposed OACCA performed much better than the calibration-free CCA, and comparable to the calibration-based algorithms.

SIGNIFICANCE

This work provides a general way for the SSVEP-based BCIs to learn online from unlabeled data and thus avoid calibration.

Enhancing transfer performance across datasets for brain-computer interfaces using a combination of alignment strategies and adaptive batch normalization

Objective. Recently, transfer learning (TL) and deep learning (DL) have been introduced to solve intra- and inter-subject variability problems in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, current TL and DL algorithms are usually validated within a single dataset, assuming that data of the test subjects are acquired under the same condition as that of training (source) subjects. This assumption is generally violated in practice because of different acquisition systems and experimental settings across studies and datasets. Thus, the generalization ability of these algorithms needs further validations in a cross-dataset scenario, which is closer to the actual situation. This study compared the transfer performance of pre-trained deep-learning models with different preprocessing strategies in a cross-dataset scenario.Approach. This study used four publicly available motor imagery datasets, each was successively selected as a source dataset, and the others were used as target datasets. EEGNet and ShallowConvNet with four preprocessing strategies, namely channel normalization, trial normalization, Euclidean alignment, and Riemannian alignment, were trained with the source dataset. The transfer performance of pre-trained models was validated on the target datasets. This study also used adaptive batch normalization (AdaBN) for reducing interval covariate shift across datasets. This study compared the transfer performance of using the four preprocessing strategies and that of a baseline approach based on manifold embedded knowledge transfer (MEKT). This study also explored the possibility and performance of fusing MEKT and EEGNet.Main results. The results show that DL models with alignment strategies had significantly better transfer performance than the other two preprocessing strategies. As an unsupervised domain adaptation method, AdaBN could also significantly improve the transfer performance of DL models. The transfer performance of DL models that combined AdaBN and alignment strategies significantly outperformed MEKT. Moreover, the generalizability of EEGNet models that combined AdaBN and alignment strategies could be further improved via the domain adaptation step in MEKT, achieving the best generalization ability among multiple datasets (BNCI2014001: 0.788, PhysionetMI: 0.679, Weibo2014: 0.753, Cho2017: 0.650).Significance. The combination of alignment strategies and AdaBN could easily improve the generalizability of DL models without fine-tuning. This study may provide new insights into the design of transfer neural networks for BCIs by separating source and target batch normalization layers in the domain adaptation process.

Align and pool for EEG headset domain adaptation (ALPHA) to facilitate dry electrode based SSVEP-BCI

OBJECTIVE

The steady-state visual evoked potential based brain-computer interface (SSVEP-BCI) implemented in dry electrodes is a promising paradigm for alternative and augmentative communication in real-world applications. To improve its performance and reduce the calibration effort for dry-electrode systems, we utilize cross-device transfer learning by exploiting auxiliary individual wet-electrode electroencephalogram (EEG).

METHODS

We proposed a novel transfer learning framework named ALign and Pool for EEG Headset domain Adaptation (ALPHA), which aligns the spatial pattern and the covariance for domain adaptation. To evaluate its efficacy, 75 subjects performed an experiment of 2 sessions involving a 12-target SSVEP-BCI task.

RESULTS

ALPHA significantly outperformed a baseline approach (canonical correlation analysis, CCA) and two competing transfer learning approaches (transfer template CCA, ttCCA and least square transformation, LST) in two transferring directions. When transferring from wet to dry EEG headsets, ALPHA significantly outperformed the fully calibrated approach of task-related component analysis (TRCA).

CONCLUSION

ALPHA advances the frontier of recalibration-free cross-device transfer learning for SSVEP-BCIs and boosts the performance of dry electrode based systems.

SIGNIFICANCE

ALPHA has methodological and practical implications and pushes the boundary of dry electrode based SSVEP-BCI toward real-world applications.

Review of brain encoding and decoding mechanisms for EEG-based brain-computer interface

A brain-computer interface (BCI) can connect humans and machines directly and has achieved successful applications in the past few decades. Many new BCI paradigms and algorithms have been developed in recent years. Therefore, it is necessary to review new progress in BCIs. This paper summarizes progress for EEG-based BCIs from the perspective of encoding paradigms and decoding algorithms, which are two key elements of BCI systems. Encoding paradigms are grouped by their underlying neural meachanisms, namely sensory- and motor-related, vision-related, cognition-related and hybrid paradigms. Decoding algorithms are reviewed in four categories, namely decomposition algorithms, Riemannian geometry, deep learning and transfer learning. This review will provide a comprehensive overview of both modern primary paradigms and algorithms, making it helpful for those who are developing BCI systems.

Filter Bank-Driven Multivariate Synchronization Index for Training-Free SSVEP BCI

In recent years, multivariate synchronization index (MSI) algorithm, as a novel frequency detection method, has attracted increasing attentions in the study of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on steady state visual evoked potential (SSVEP). However, MSI algorithm is hard to fully exploit SSVEP-related harmonic components in the electroencephalogram (EEG), which limits the application of MSI algorithm in BCI systems. In this paper, we propose a novel filter bank-driven MSI algorithm (FBMSI) to overcome the limitation and further improve the accuracy of SSVEP recognition. We evaluate the efficacy of the FBMSI method by developing a 6-command SSVEP-NAO robot system with extensive experimental analyses. An offline experimental study is first performed with EEG collected from nine subjects to investigate the effects of varying parameters on the model performance. Offline results show that the proposed method has achieved a stable improvement effect. We further conduct an online experiment with six subjects to assess the efficacy of the developed FBMSI algorithm in a real-time BCI application. The online experimental results show that the FBMSI algorithm yields a promising average accuracy of 83.56% using a data length of even only one second, which was 12.26% higher than the standard MSI algorithm. These extensive experimental results confirmed the effectiveness of the FBMSI algorithm in SSVEP recognition and demonstrated its potential application in the development of improved BCI systems.