Clustered event related spectral perturbation (ERSP) feature in right hand motor imagery classification

A technology that allows humans to interact with machines more directly and efficiently would be desirable. Research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provides the possibility for computers to understand human thoughts in a straightforward manner thereby facilitating communication. As a branch of BCI research, motor imagery (MI) techniques analyze the brain signals and help people in many aspects such as rehabilitation, clinical applications, entertainment, and system controlling. In this study, an imagery experiment consisting of four kinds of right-hand movements (gripping, opening, pronation, and supination) was designed. Then a novel feature, namely, clustered feature was proposed based on the event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) calculated from the EEG signal. Based on the selected features, two classical classifiers (support vector machine and linear discriminant classifier) were trained, achieving an acceptable accurate result (80%, on average).