Exploration of Subjective Color Perceptual-Ability by EEG-Induced Type-2 Fuzzy Classifiers

Abstract

Perceptual-ability informally refers to the ability of a person to recognize a stimulus. This paper deals with color perceptual-ability measurement of subjects using brain response to basic color (red, green and blue) stimuli. It also attempts to determine subjective ability to recognize the base colors in presence of noise tolerance of the base colors, referred to as recognition tolerance. Because of intra- and inter-session variations in subjective brain signal features for a given color stimulus, there exists uncertainty in perceptual-ability. In addition, small variations in the color stimulus result in wide variations in brain signal features, introducing uncertainty in perceptual-ability of the subject. Type-2 fuzzy logic has been employed to handle the uncertainty in color perceptual-ability measurements due to a) variations in brain signal features for a given color, and b) the presence of colored noise on the base colors. Because of limited power of uncertainty management of interval type-2 fuzzy sets and high computational overhead of its general type-2 counterpart, we developed a semi-general type-2 fuzzy classifier to recognize the base color. It is important to note that the proposed technique transforms a vertical slice based general type-2 fuzzy set into an equivalent interval type-2 counterpart to reduce the computational overhead, without losing the contributions of the secondary memberships. The proposed semi-general type-2 fuzzy sets induced classifier yields superior performance in classification accuracy with respect to existing type-1, type-2 and other well-known classifiers. The brain-understanding of a perceived base or noisy base colors is also obtained by exact low resolution electromagnetic topographic analysis (e-LORETA) software. This is used as the reference for our experimental results of the semi-general type-2 classifier in color perceptual-ability detection. Statistical tests undertaken confirm the superiority of the proposed classifier over its competitors. The proposed technique is expected to have interesting applications in identifying people with excellent color perceptual-ability for chemical, pharmaceutical and textile industries