Online SSVEP-based BCI using Riemannian geometry

Challenges for the next generation of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) are to mitigate the common sources of variability (electronic, electrical, biological) and to develop online and adaptive systems following the evolution of the subject's brain waves. Studying electroencephalographic (EEG) signals from their associated covariance matrices allows the construction of a representation which is invariant to extrinsic perturbations. As covariance matrices should be estimated, this paper first presents a thorough study of all estimators conducted on real EEG recording. Working in Euclidean space with covariance matrices is known to be error-prone, one might take advantage of algorithmic advances in Riemannian geometry and matrix manifold to implement methods for Symmetric Positive-Definite (SPD) matrices. Nonetheless, existing classification algorithms in Riemannian spaces are designed for offline analysis. We propose a novel algorithm for online and asynchronous processing of brain signals, borrowing principles from semi-unsupervised approaches and following a dynamic stopping scheme to provide a prediction as soon as possible. The assessment is conducted on real EEG recording: this is the first study on Steady State Visually Evoked Potential (SSVEP) experimentations to exploit online classification based on Riemannian geometry. The proposed online algorithm is evaluated and compared with state-of-the-art SSVEP methods, which are based on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA). It is shown to improve both the classification accuracy and the information transfer rate in the online and asynchronous setup. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.