EEG-Based Emotion Recognition Using Regularized Graph Neural Networks

Electroencephalography (EEG) measures the neuronal activities in different brain regions via electrodes. Many existing studies on EEG-based emotion recognition do not fully exploit the topology of EEG channels. In this paper, we propose a regularized graph neural network (RGNN) for EEG-based emotion recognition. RGNN considers the biological topology among different brain regions to capture both local and global relations among different EEG channels. Specifically, we model the inter-channel relations in EEG signals via an adjacency matrix in a graph neural network where the connection and sparseness of the adjacency matrix are inspired by neuroscience theories of human brain organization. In addition, we propose two regularizers, namely node-wise domain adversarial training (NodeDAT) and emotion-aware distribution learning (EmotionDL), to better handle cross-subject EEG variations and noisy labels, respectively. Extensive experiments on two public datasets, SEED and SEED-IV, demonstrate the superior performance of our model than state-of-the-art models in most experimental settings. Moreover, ablation studies show that the proposed adjacency matrix and two regularizers contribute consistent and significant gain to the performance of our RGNN model. Finally, investigations on the neuronal activities reveal important brain regions and inter-channel relations for EEG-based emotion recognition

Converting Your Thoughts to Texts: Enabling Brain Typing via Deep Feature Learning of EEG Signals

An electroencephalography (EEG) based Brain Computer Interface (BCI) enables people to communicate with the outside world by interpreting the EEG signals of their brains to interact with devices such as wheelchairs and intelligent robots. More specifically, motor imagery EEG (MI-EEG), which reflects a subjects active intent, is attracting increasing attention for a variety of BCI applications. Accurate classification of MI-EEG signals while essential for effective operation of BCI systems, is challenging due to the significant noise inherent in the signals and the lack of informative correlation between the signals and brain activities. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network based learning framework that affords perceptive insights into the relationship between the MI-EEG data and brain activities. We design a joint convolutional recurrent neural network that simultaneously learns robust high-level feature presentations through low-dimensional dense embeddings from raw MI-EEG signals. We also employ an Autoencoder layer to eliminate various artifacts such as background activities. The proposed approach has been evaluated extensively on a large- scale public MI-EEG dataset and a limited but easy-to-deploy dataset collected in our lab. The results show that our approach outperforms a series of baselines and the competitive state-of-the- art methods, yielding a classification accuracy of 95.53%. The applicability of our proposed approach is further demonstrated with a practical BCI system for typing.Comment: 10 page

Discriminative Tandem Features for HMM-based EEG Classification

Abstract—We investigate the use of discriminative feature extractors in tandem configuration with generative EEG classification system. Existing studies on dynamic EEG classification typically use hidden Markov models (HMMs) which lack discriminative capability. In this paper, a linear and a non-linear classifier are discriminatively trained to produce complementary input features to the conventional HMM system. Two sets of tandem features are derived from linear discriminant analysis (LDA) projection output and multilayer perceptron (MLP) class-posterior probability, before appended to the standard autoregressive (AR) features. Evaluation on a two-class motor-imagery classification task shows that both the proposed tandem features yield consistent gains over the AR baseline, resulting in significant relative improvement of 6.2% and 11.2 % for the LDA and MLP features respectively. We also explore portability of these features across different subjects. Index Terms- Artificial neural network-hidden Markov models, EEG classification, brain-computer-interface (BCI)

Learning Representations from EEG with Deep Recurrent-Convolutional Neural Networks

One of the challenges in modeling cognitive events from electroencephalogram (EEG) data is finding representations that are invariant to inter- and intra-subject differences, as well as to inherent noise associated with such data. Herein, we propose a novel approach for learning such representations from multi-channel EEG time-series, and demonstrate its advantages in the context of mental load classification task. First, we transform EEG activities into a sequence of topology-preserving multi-spectral images, as opposed to standard EEG analysis techniques that ignore such spatial information. Next, we train a deep recurrent-convolutional network inspired by state-of-the-art video classification to learn robust representations from the sequence of images. The proposed approach is designed to preserve the spatial, spectral, and temporal structure of EEG which leads to finding features that are less sensitive to variations and distortions within each dimension. Empirical evaluation on the cognitive load classification task demonstrated significant improvements in classification accuracy over current state-of-the-art approaches in this field.Comment: To be published as a conference paper at ICLR 201

Investigating the use of pretrained convolutional neural network on cross-subject and cross-dataset EEG emotion recognition

The electroencephalogram (EEG) has great attraction in emotion recognition studies due to its resistance to deceptive actions of humans. This is one of the most significant advantages of brain signals in comparison to visual or speech signals in the emotion recognition context. A major challenge in EEG-based emotion recognition is that EEG recordings exhibit varying distributions for different people as well as for the same person at different time instances. This nonstationary nature of EEG limits the accuracy of it when subject independency is the priority. The aim of this study is to increase the subject-independent recognition accuracy by exploiting pretrained state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures. Unlike similar studies that extract spectral band power features from the EEG readings, raw EEG data is used in our study after applying windowing, pre-adjustments and normalization. Removing manual feature extraction from the training system overcomes the risk of eliminating hidden features in the raw data and helps leverage the deep neural network’s power in uncovering unknown features. To improve the classification accuracy further, a median filter is used to eliminate the false detections along a prediction interval of emotions. This method yields a mean cross-subject accuracy of 86.56% and 78.34% on the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Emotion EEG Dataset (SEED) for two and three emotion classes, respectively. It also yields a mean cross-subject accuracy of 72.81% on the Database for Emotion Analysis using Physiological Signals (DEAP) and 81.8% on the Loughborough University Multimodal Emotion Dataset (LUMED) for two emotion classes. Furthermore, the recognition model that has been trained using the SEED dataset was tested with the DEAP dataset, which yields a mean prediction accuracy of 58.1% across all subjects and emotion classes. Results show that in terms of classification accuracy, the proposed approach is superior to, or on par with, the reference subject-independent EEG emotion recognition studies identified in literature and has limited complexity due to the elimination of the need for feature extraction.<br

A LightGBM-Based EEG Analysis Method for Driver Mental States Classification

Fatigue driving can easily lead to road traffic accidents and bring great harm to individuals and families. Recently, electroencephalography- (EEG-) based physiological and brain activities for fatigue detection have been increasingly investigated. However, how to find an effective method or model to timely and efficiently detect the mental states of drivers still remains a challenge. In this paper, we combine common spatial pattern (CSP) and propose a light-weighted classifier, LightFD, which is based on gradient boosting framework for EEG mental states identification. ,e comparable results with traditional classifiers, such as support vector machine (SVM), convolutional neural network (CNN), gated recurrent unit (GRU), and large margin nearest neighbor (LMNN), show that the proposed model could achieve better classification performance, as well as the decision efficiency. Furthermore, we also test and validate that LightFD has better transfer learning performance in EEG classification of driver mental states. In summary, our proposed LightFD classifier has better performance in real-time EEG mental state prediction, and it is expected to have broad application prospects in practical brain-computer interaction (BCI)