A Novel Convolutional Neural Network Classification Approach of Motor-Imagery EEG Recording Based on Deep Learning

Recently, Electroencephalography (EEG) motor imagery (MI) signals have received increasing attention because it became possible to use these signals to encode a person's intention to perform an action. Researchers have used MI signals to help people with partial or total paralysis, control devices such as exoskeletons, wheelchairs, prostheses, and even independent driving. Therefore, classifying the motor imagery tasks of these signals is important for a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) system. Classifying the MI tasks from EEG signals is difficult to offer a good decoder due to the dynamic nature of the signal, its low signal-to-noise ratio, complexity, and dependence on the sensor positions. In this paper, we investigate five multilayer methods for classifying MI tasks: proposed methods based on Artificial Neural Network, Convolutional Neural Network 1 (CNN1), CNN2, CNN1 with CNN2 merged, and the modified CNN1 with CNN2 merged. These proposed methods use different spatial and temporal characteristics extracted from raw EEG data. We demonstrate that our proposed CNN1-based method outperforms state-of-the-art machine/deep learning techniques for EEG classification by an accuracy value of 68.77% and use spatial and frequency characteristics on the BCI Competition IV-2a dataset, which includes nine subjects performing four MI tasks (left/right hand, feet, and tongue). The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of this proposed method for the classification of MI-EEG signals and can be applied successfully to BCI systems where the amount of data is large due to daily recording.