An efficient deep learning framework for P300 evoked related potential detection in EEG signal

Incorporating the time-frequency localization properties of Gabor transform (GT), the complexity understandings of convolutional neural network (CNN), and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) efficacy in distinguishing positive peaks can exhibit their characteristics to reveal an effective solution in the detection of P300 evoked related potential (ERP). By applying a drastic number of convolutional layers, the majority of deep networks elicit sufficient properties for the output determination, leading to gigantic and time-consuming structures. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework by the combination of tuned GT, and modified HOG with the CNN as "TGT-MHOG-CNN" for detection of P300 ERP in EEG signal.

In the proposed method, GT is tuned based on triangular function for EEG signals, and then spectrograms including time-frequency information are captured. The function's parameters are justified to differentiate the signals with the P300 component. Furthermore, HOG is modified (MHOG) for the 2-D EEG signal, and consequently, gradients patterns are extracted for the target potentials. MHOG is potent in distinguishing the positive peak in the general waveform; however, GT unravels time-frequency information, which is ignored in the gradient histogram. These outputs of GT and MHOG do not share the same nature in the images nor overlap. Therefore, more extensive information is reached without redundancy or excessive information by fusing them. Combining GT and MHOG provides different patterns which benefit CNN for more precise detection. Consequently, TGT-MHOG-CNN ends in a more straightforward structure than other networks, and therefore, the whole performance is acceptable with faster rates and very high accuracy.

BCI Competition II and III datasets are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. These datasets include a complete record for P300 ERP with BCI2000 using a paradigm, and it has numerous noises, including power and muscle-based noises. The objective is to predict the correct character in each provided character selection epochs. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, simulation results indicate striking abilities of the proposed framework for P300 ERP detection. Our best record reached the P300 ERP classification rates of over 98.7% accuracy and 98.7% precision for BCI Competition II and 99% accuracy and 100% precision for BCI Competition III datasets, with superiority in execution time for the mentioned datasets.