Online removal of muscle artifact from electroencephalogram signals based on canonical correlation analysis

The electroencephalogram (EEG) is often contaminated by electromyography (EMG). In this paper, a novel and robust technique is presented to eliminate EMG artifacts from EEG signals in real-time. First, the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) method is applied on the simulated EEG data contaminated by EMG and electrooculography (EOG) artifacts for separating EMG artifacts from EEG signals. The components responsible for EMG artifacts are distinguished from those responsible for brain activity based on the relative low autocorrelation. We demonstrate that the CCA method is more suitable to reconstruct the EMG-free EEG data than independent component analysis (ICA) methods. In addition, by applying CCA to analyze a number of EEG data contaminated by EMG artifacts, a correlation threshold is determined using an unbiased procedure. Hence, CCA can be used to remove EMG artifacts automatically. Finally, an example is given to verify that, after EMG artifacts were removed successfully from the EEG data contaminated by EMG and EOG simultaneously, not only the underlying brain activity signals but the EOG artifacts are preserved with little distortion.