A Decoding Scheme for Incomplete Motor Imagery EEG With Deep Belief Network

High accuracy decoding of electroencephalogram (EEG) signal is still a major challenge that can hardly be solved in the design of an effective motor imagery-based brain-computer interface (BCI), especially when the signal contains various extreme artifacts and outliers arose from data loss. The conventional process to avoid such cases is to directly reject the entire severely contaminated EEG segments, which leads to a drawback that the BCI has no decoding results during that certain period. In this study, a novel decoding scheme based on the combination of Lomb-Scargle periodogram (LSP) and deep belief network (DBN) was proposed to recognize the incomplete motor imagery EEG. Particularly, instead of discarding the entire segment, two forms of data removal were adopted to eliminate the EEG portions with extreme artifacts and data loss. The LSP was utilized to steadily extract the power spectral density (PSD) features from the incomplete EEG constructed by the remaining portions. A DBN structure based on the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) was exploited and optimized to perform the classification task. Various comparative experiments were conducted and evaluated on simulated signal and real incomplete motor imagery EEG, including the comparison of three PSD extraction methods (fast Fourier transform, Welch and LSP) and two classifiers (DBN and support vector machine, SVM). The results demonstrate that the LSP can estimate relative robust PSD features and the proposed scheme can significantly improve the decoding performance for the incomplete motor imagery EEG. This scheme can provide an alternative decoding solution for the motor imagery EEG contaminated by extreme artifacts and data loss. It can be beneficial to promote the stability, smoothness and maintain consecutive outputs without interruption for a BCI system that is suitable for the online and long-term application.