Extracting a Novel Emotional EEG Topographic Map Based on a Stacked Autoencoder Network

Emotion recognition based on brain signals has increasingly become attractive to evaluate human's internal emotional states. Conventional emotion recognition studies focus on developing machine learning and classifiers. However, most of these methods do not provide information on the involvement of different areas of the brain in emotions. Brain mapping is considered as one of the most distinguishing methods of showing the involvement of different areas of the brain in performing an activity. Most mapping techniques rely on projection and visualization of only one of the electroencephalogram (EEG) subband features onto brain regions. The present study aims to develop a new EEG-based brain mapping, which combines several features to provide more complete and useful information on a single map instead of common maps. In this study, the optimal combination of EEG features for each channel was extracted using a stacked autoencoder (SAE) network and visualizing a topographic map. Based on the research hypothesis, autoencoders can extract optimal features for quantitative EEG (QEEG) brain mapping. The DEAP EEG database was employed to extract topographic maps. The accuracy of image classifiers using the convolutional neural network (CNN) was used as a criterion for evaluating the distinction of the obtained maps from a stacked autoencoder topographic map (SAETM) method for different emotions. The average classification accuracy was obtained 0.8173 and 0.8037 in the valence and arousal dimensions, respectively. The extracted maps were also ranked by a team of experts compared to common maps. The results of quantitative and qualitative evaluation showed that the obtained map by SAETM has more information than conventional maps.