SUMMARYA brain-computer interface (BCI) translates the brain activity into commands to control external devices. P300 speller based character recognition is an important kind of application system in BCI. In this paper, we propose a framework to integrate channel correlation analysis into P300 detection. This work is distinguished by two key contributions. First, a coefficient matrix is introduced and constructed for multiple channels with the elements indicating channel correlations. Agglomerative clustering is applied to group correlated channels. Second, the statistics of central tendency are used to fuse the information of correlated channels and generate virtual channels. The generated virtual channels can extend the EEG signals and lift up the signal-to-noise ratio. The correlated features from virtual channels are combined with original signals for classification and the outputs of discriminative classifier are used to determine the characters for spelling. Experimental results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the channel correlation analysis based framework. Compared with the state-of-the-art, the recognition rate was increased by both 6% with 5 and 10 epochs by the proposed framework. key words: brain-computer interface (BCI), channel correlation analysis, virtual channels, P300 speller paradigm

A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) aims to produce a new way for people to communicate with computers.Brain signal classification is a challenging issue owing to the high-dimensional data and low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). In this paper, a novel method is proposed to cope with this problem through sparse representation for the P300 speller paradigm. This work is distinguished using two key contributions. First, we investigate sparse coding and its feasibility for brain signal classification. Training signals are used to learn the dictionaries and test signals are classified according to their sparse representation and reconstruction errors. Second, sample selection and a channel-aware dictionary are proposed to reduce the effect of noise, which can improve performance and enhance the computing efficiency simultaneously. A novel classification method from the sample set perspective is proposed to exploit channel correlations. Specifically, the brain signal of each channel is classified jointly using its spatially neighboring channels and a novel weighted regulation strategy is proposed to overcome outliers in the group. Experimental results have demonstrated that our methods are highly effective. We achieve a state-of-the-art recognition rate of 72.5%, 88.5%, and 98.5% at 5, 10, and 15 epochs, respectively, on BCI Competition III Dataset II.

No abstract

No abstract