DEEMD-SPP: A Novel Framework for Emotion Recognition Based on EEG Signals

Electroencephalography (EEG) is one of the most widely-used biosignal capturing technology for investigating brain activities, cognitive diseases, and affective disorders. To understand the underlying principles of brain activities and affective disorders using EEG data, one of the fundamental tasks is to accurately identify emotions from EEG signals, which has attracted huge attention in the field of affective computing. To improve the accuracy and effectiveness of emotion recognition based on EEG data, previous studies have successfully developed numerous feature extraction methods and classifiers. Among them, ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) is an efficient signal decomposition technique for extracting EEG features. It can alleviate the mode-mixing problem by adding white noise to the source signal. However, there remain some issues when applying this method to recognition tasks. As the added noise cannot be filtered completely, spurious modes are generated due to the residual noise. Therefore, it is crucial to perform intrinsic mode function (IMF) selection to find the most valuable IMF components that represent brain activities. Furthermore, the number of decomposed IMFs is various to different original signals, thus how to unify feature dimensions needs better solutions. To solve these issues, we propose a novel forecasting framework, named DEEMD-SPP, to identify emotions from EEG signals, based on the combination of denoising ensemble empirical mode decomposition (DEEMD) and Spatial Pyramid Pooling Network (SPP-Net). First, DEEMD is proposed to decompose the EEG signals, which effectively eliminates residual noise in the IMFs and selects the most valuable IMFs. Second, time-domain and frequency-domain features are extracted from the selected IMFs. Finally, SPP-net is employed as the classifier to recognize emotions, which can effectively transform various-sized feature maps into fixed-sized feature vectors through the pyramid pooling layer. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed DEEMD-SPP framework can effectively reduce the effect of spike-in white noise, accurately extract EEG features, and significantly improve the performance of emotion recognition.