Bilinear neural network with 3-D attention for brain decoding of motor imagery movements from the human EEG

Deep learning has achieved great success in areas such as computer vision and natural language processing. In the past, some work used convolutional networks to process EEG signals and reached or exceeded traditional machine learning methods. We propose a novel network structure and call it QNet. It contains a newly designed attention module: 3D-AM, which is used to learn the attention weights of EEG channels, time points, and feature maps. It provides a way to automatically learn the electrode and time selection. QNet uses a dual branch structure to fuse bilinear vectors for classification. It performs four, three, and two classes on the EEG Motor Movement/Imagery Dataset. The average cross-validation accuracy of 65.82%, 74.75%, and 82.88% was obtained, which are 7.24%, 4.93%, and 2.45% outperforms than the state-of-the-art, respectively. The article also visualizes the attention weights learned by QNet and shows its possible application for electrode channel selection.