Discrimination of Motor Imagery Patterns by Electroencephalogram Phase Synchronization Combined With Frequency Band Energy

Central nerve signal evoked by thoughts can be directly used to control a robot or prosthetic devices without the involvement of the peripheral nerve and muscles.This is a new strategy of human-computer interaction.A method of electroencephalogram(EEG) phase synchronization combined with band energy was proposed to construct a feature vector for pattern recognition of brain-computer interaction based on EEG induced by motor imagery in this paper,rhythm and beta rhythm were first extracted from EEG by band pass filter and then the frequency band energy was calculated by the sliding time window;the instantaneous phase values were obtained using Hilbert transform and then the phase synchronization feature was calculated by the phase locking value(PLV) and the best time interval for extracting the phase synchronization feature was searched by the distribution of the PLV value in the time domain.Finally,discrimination of motor imagery patterns was performed by the support vector machine(SVM).The results showed that the phase synchronization feature more effective in4s-7s and the correct classification rate was 91.4%.Compared with the results achieved by a single EEG feature related to motor imagery,the correct classification rate was improved by 3.5 and4.3 percentage points by combining phase synchronization with band energy.These indicate that the proposed method is effective and it is expected that the study provides a way to improve the performance of the online real-time brain-computer interaction control system based on EEG related to motor imagery.

Comparison of Different Implementations of MFCC

The performance of the Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC) may be affected by (1) the number of filters, (2) the shape of filters, (3) the way in which filters are spaced, and (4) the way in which the power spectrum is warped. In this paper, several compar- ison experiments are done to find a best implementation. The traditional MFCC calculation excludes the 0th coefficient for the reason that it is regarded as somewhat unreliable. According to the analysis and experiments, the authors find that it can be regarded as the generalized frequency band energy (FBE) and is hence useful, which results in the FBE-MFCC. The au- thors also propose a better analysis, namely the auto-regressive analysis, on the frame energy, which outperforms its 1st and/or 2nd order differential derivatives. Experiments with the '863' Speech Database show that, compared with the traditional MFCC with its corresponding auto- regressive analysis coefficients, the FBE-MFCC and the frame energy with their corresponding auto-regressive analysis coefficients form the best combination, reducing the Chinese syllable er- ror rate (CSER) by about 10%, while the FBE-MFCC with the corresponding auto-regressive analysis coefficients reduces CSER by 2.5%. Comparison experiments are also done with a quite casual Chinese speech database, named Chinese Annotated Spontaneous Speech (CASS) corpus. The FBE-MFCC can reduce the error rate by about 2.9% on an average.