STSNet: a novel spatio-temporal-spectral network for subject-independent EEG-based emotion recognition

How to use the characteristics of EEG signals to obtain more complementary and discriminative data representation is an issue in EEG-based emotion recognition. Many studies have tried spatio-temporal or spatio-spectral feature fusion to obtain higher-level representations of EEG data. However, these studies ignored the complementarity between spatial, temporal and spectral domains of EEG signals, thus limiting the classification ability of models. This study proposed an end-to-end network based on ManifoldNet and BiLSTM networks, named STSNet. The STSNet first constructed a 4-D spatio-temporal-spectral data representation and a spatio-temporal data representation based on EEG signals in manifold space. After that, they were fed into the ManifoldNet network and the BiLSTM network respectively to calculate higher-level features and achieve spatio-temporal-spectral feature fusion. Finally, extensive comparative experiments were performed on two public datasets, DEAP and DREAMER, using the subject-independent leave-one-subject-out cross-validation strategy. On the DEAP dataset, the average accuracy of the valence and arousal are 69.38% and 71.88%, respectively; on the DREAMER dataset, the average accuracy of the valence and arousal are 78.26% and 82.37%, respectively. Experimental results show that the STSNet model has good emotion recognition performance.