EEG Emotion Recognition via Graph-based Spatio-Temporal Attention Neural Networks

Emotion recognition based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals has been receiving significant attention in the domains of affective computing and brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Although several deep learning methods have been proposed dealing with the emotion recognition task, developing methods that effectively extract and use discriminative features is still a challenge. In this work, we propose the novel spatio-temporal attention neural network (STANN) to extract discriminative spatial and temporal features of EEG signals by a parallel structure of multi-column convolutional neural network and attention-based bidirectional long-short term memory. Moreover, we explore the inter-channel relationships of EEG signals via graph signal processing (GSP) tools. Our experimental analysis demonstrates that the proposed network improves the state-of-the-art results in subject-wise, binary classification of valence and arousal levels as well as four-class classification in the valence-arousal emotion space when raw EEG signals or their graph representations, in an architecture coined as GFT-STANN, are used as model inputs.