Classification of EEG Signals Based on Filter Bank and Sparse Representation in Motor Imagery Brain-Computer Interfaces

To improve the classification performance of motor imagery (MI) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), a new signal processing algorithm for classifying electroencephalogram (EEG) signals by combining filter bank and sparse representation is proposed. The broadband EEG signals of 830Hz are segmented into 10 sub-band signals using a filter bank. EEG signals in each sub-band are spatially filtered by common spatial pattern (CSP). Fisher score combined with grid search is used for selecting the optimal sub-band, the band power of which is employed for designing a dictionary matrix. A testing signal can be sparsely represented as a linear combination of some columns of the dictionary. The sparse coefficients are estimated by l(1) norm optimization, and the residuals of sparse coefficients are exploited for classification. The proposed classification algorithm was applied to two BCI datasets and compared with two traditional broadband CSP-based algorithms. The results showed that the proposed algorithm provided superior classification accuracies, which were better than those yielded by traditional algorithms, verifying the efficacy of the present algorithm.