Privacy-Preserving Domain Adaptation for Motor Imagery-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces

Objective: Electroencephalogram (EEG) is one of the most widely used signals in motor imagery (MI) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Domain adaptation has been frequently used to improve the accuracy of EEG-based BCIs for a new user (target domain), by making use of labeled data from a previous user (source domain). However, this raises privacy concerns, as EEG contains sensitive health and mental information. It is very important to perform privacy-preserving domain adaptation, which simultaneously improves the classification accuracy for a new user and protects the privacy of a previous user. Methods: We propose augmentation-based source-free adaptation (ASFA), which consists of two parts: 1) source model training, where a novel data augmentation approach is proposed for MI EEG signals to improve the cross-subject generalization performance of the source model; and, 2) target model training, which simultaneously considers uncertainty reduction for domain adaptation and consistency regularization for robustness. ASFA only needs access to the source model parameters, instead of the raw EEG data, thus protecting the privacy of the source domain. We further extend ASFA to a stricter privacy-preserving scenario, where the source model's parameters are also inaccessible. Results: Experimental results on four MI datasets demonstrated that ASFA outperformed 15 classical and state-of-the-art MI classification approaches. Significance: This is the first work on completely source-free domain adaptation for EEG-based BCIs. Our proposed ASFA achieves high classification accuracy and strong privacy protection simultaneously, important for the commercial applications of EEG-based BCIs.