Sub-band common spatial pattern (SBCSP) for brain-computer interface

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a system to translate humans thoughts into commands. For electroencephalography (EEG) based BCI, motor imagery is considered as one of the most effective ways. Different imagery activities can be classified based on the changes in mu and/or beta rhythms and their spatial distributions. However, the change in these rhythmic patterns varies from one subject to another. This causes an unavoidable time-consuming fine-tuning process in building a BCI for every subject. To address this issue, we propose a new method called sub-band common spatial pattern (SBCSP) to solve the problem. First, we decompose the EEG signals into sub-bands using a filter bank. Subsequently, we apply a discriminative analysis to extract SBCSP features. The SBCSP features are then fed into linear discriminant analyzers (LDA) to obtain scores which reflect the classification capability of each frequency band. Finally, the scores are fused to make decision. We evaluate two fusion methods: recursive band elimination (RBE) and meta-classifier (MC). We assess our approaches on a standard database from BCI Competition III. We also compare our method with two other approaches that address the same issue. The results show that our method outperforms the other two approaches and achieves similar result as compared to the best one in the literature which was obtained by a time-consuming fine-tuning process.