Suppressing of Power Line Artifact From Electroencephalogram Measurements Using Sparsity in Frequency Domain

Electroencephalogram (EEG) plays an important role in brain disease diagnosis and research of brain-computer interface (BCI). However, the measurements of EEG are often exposed to strong interference of power line artifact (PLA). Digital notch filters (DNFs) can be applied to remove the PLA effectively, but it also results in severe signal distortions in the time domain. To address this problem, spectrum correction (SC) based methods can be utilized. These methods estimate harmonic parameters of the PLA such that compensation signals are produced to remove the noise. In order to ensure high accuracy during harmonic parameter estimations, a novel approach is proposed in this paper. This novel approach is based on the combination of sparse representation (SR) and SC. It can deeply mine the information of PLA in the frequency domain. Firstly, a ratio-based spectrum correction (RBSC) using rectangular window is employed to make rough estimation of the harmonic parameters of PLA. Secondly, the two spectral line closest to the estimated frequency are calculated. Thirdly, the two spectral lines with high amplitudes can be utilized as input of RBSC to make finer estimations of the harmonic parameters. Finally, a compensation signal, based on the extracted harmonic parameters, is generated to suppress PLA. Numerical simulations and actual EEG signals with PLA were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the improved approach. It is verified that this approach can effectively suppress the PLA without distorting the time-domain waveform of the EEG signal.