A spatio-temporal filtering approach to denoising of single-trial ERP in rapid image triage

Conventional search for images containing points of interest (POI) in large-volume imagery is costly and sometimes even infeasible. The rapid image triage (RIT) system which is a human cognition guided computer vision technique is potentially a promising solution to the problem. In the RIT procedure, images are sequentially presented to a subject at a high speed. At the instant of observing a POI image, unique POI event-related potentials (ERP) characterized by P300 will be elicited and measured on the scalp. With accurate single-trial detection of such unique ERP, RIT can differentiate POI images from non-POI images. However, like other brain-computer interface systems relying on single-trial detection, RIT suffers from the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the single-trial ERP. This paper presents a spatio-temporal filtering approach tailored for the denoising of single-trial ERP for RIT. The proposed approach is essentially a non-uniformly delayed spatial Gaussian filter that attempts to suppress the non-event related background electroencephalogram (EEG) and other noises without significantly attenuating the useful ERP signals. The efficacy of the proposed approach is illustrated by both simulation tests and real RIT experiments. In particular, the real RIT experiments on 20 subjects show a statistically significant and meaningful average decrease of 9.8% in RIT classification error rate, compared to that without the proposed approach.