An Introduction to EEG Source Analysis with an illustration of a study on Error-Related Potentials

International audienceOver the last twenty years blind source separation (BSS) has become a fundamental signal processing tool in the study of human electroencephalography (EEG), other biological data, as well as in many other signal processing domains such as speech, images, geophysics and wireless communication (Comon and Jutten, 2010). Without relying on head modeling BSS aims at estimating both the waveform and the scalp spatial pattern of the intracranial dipolar current responsible of the observed EEG, increasing the sensitivity and specificity of the signal received from the electrodes on the scalp. This chapter begins with a short review of brain volume conduction theory, demonstrating that BSS modeling is grounded on current physiological knowledge. We then illustrate a general BSS scheme requiring the estimation of second-order statistics (SOS) only. A simple and efficient implementation based on the approximate joint diagonalization of covariance matrices (AJDC) is described. The method operates in the same way in the time or frequency domain (or both at the same time) and is capable of modeling explicitly physiological and experimental source of variations with remarkable flexibility. Finally, we provide a specific example illustrating the analysis of a new experimental study on error-related potentials

Mining the Bilinear Structure of Data with Approximate Joint Diagonalization

International audienceApproximate Joint Diagonalization of a matrix set can solve the linear Blind Source Separation problem. If the data possesses a bilinear structure, for example a spatio-temporal structure, transformations such as tensor decomposition can be applied. In this paper we show how the linear and bilinear joint diagonalization can be applied for extracting sources according to a composite model where some of the sources have a linear structure and other a bilinear structure. This is the case of Event Related Potentials (ERPs). The proposed model achieves higher performance in term of shape and robustness for the estimation of ERP sources in a Brain Computer Interface experiment

Sequential blind source extraction for quasi-periodic signals with time-varying period

A novel second-order-statistics-based sequential blind extraction algorithm for blind extraction of quasi-periodic signals, with time-varying period, is introduced in this paper. Source extraction is performed by sequentially converging to a solution that effectively diagonalizes autocorrelation matrices at lags corresponding to the time-varying period, which thereby explicitly exploits a key statistical nonstationary characteristic of the desired source. The algorithm is shown to have fast convergence and yields significant improvement in signal-to-interference ratio as compared to when the algorithm assumes a fixed period. The algorithm is further evaluated on the problem of separation of a heart sound signal from real-world lung sound recordings. Separation results confirm the utility of the introduced approach, and listening tests are employed to further corroborate the results

A multimodal approach to blind source separation of moving sources

A novel multimodal approach is proposed to solve the problem of blind source separation (BSS) of moving sources. The challenge of BSS for moving sources is that the mixing filters are time varying; thus, the unmixing filters should also be time varying, which are difficult to calculate in real time. In the proposed approach, the visual modality is utilized to facilitate the separation for both stationary and moving sources. The movement of the sources is detected by a 3-D tracker based on video cameras. Positions and velocities of the sources are obtained from the 3-D tracker based on a Markov Chain Monte Carlo particle filter (MCMC-PF), which results in high sampling efficiency. The full BSS solution is formed by integrating a frequency domain blind source separation algorithm and beamforming: if the sources are identified as stationary for a certain minimum period, a frequency domain BSS algorithm is implemented with an initialization derived from the positions of the source signals. Once the sources are moving, a beamforming algorithm which requires no prior statistical knowledge is used to perform real time speech enhancement and provide separation of the sources. Experimental results confirm that by utilizing the visual modality, the proposed algorithm not only improves the performance of the BSS algorithm and mitigates the permutation problem for stationary sources, but also provides a good BSS performance for moving sources in a low reverberant environment

Multimodal blind source separation for moving sources

A novel multimodal approach is proposed to solve the problem of blind source separation (BSS) of moving sources. The challenge of BSS for moving sources is that the mixing filters are time varying, thus the unmixing filters should also be time varying, which are difficult to track in real time. In the proposed approach, the visual modality is utilized to facilitate the separation for both stationary and moving sources. The movement of the sources is detected by a 3-D tracker based on particle filtering. The full BSS solution is formed by integrating a frequency domain blind source separation algorithm and beamforming: if the sources are identified as stationary, a frequency domain BSS algorithm is implemented with an initialization derived from the visual information. Once the sources are moving, a beamforming algorithm is used to perform real time speech enhancement and provide separation of the sources. Experimental results show that by utilizing the visual modality, the proposed algorithm can not only improve the performance of the BSS algorithm and mitigate the permutation problem for stationary sources, but also provide a good BSS performance for moving sources in a low reverberant environment

Blind Signal Separation for Digital Communication Data

to appear in EURASIP E-reference in Signal Processing, invited paper.International audienceBlind source separation, often called independent component analysis , is a main field of research in signal processing since the eightees. It consists in retrieving the components, up to certain indeterminacies, of a mixture involving statistically independent signals. Solid theoretical results are known; besides, they have given rise to performent algorithms. There are numerous applications of blind source separation. In this contribution, we particularize the separation of telecommunication sources. In this context, the sources stem from telecommunication devices transmitting at the same time in a given band of frequencies. The received data is a mixed version of all these sources. The aim of the receiver is to isolate (separate) the different contributions prior to estimating the unknown parameters associated with a transmitter. The context of telecommunication signals has the particularity that the sources are not stationary but cyclo-stationary. Now, in general, the standard methods of blind source separation assume the stationarity of the sources. In this contribution , we hence make a survey of the well-known methods and show how the results extend to cyclo-stationary sources