SECT: A Method of Shifted EEG Channel Transformer for Emotion Recognition

Recently, electroencephalographic (EEG) emotion recognition attract attention in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). However, most of the existing EEG emotion datasets primarily consist of data from normal human subjects. To enhance diversity, this study aims to collect EEG signals from 30 hearing-impaired subjects while they watch video clips displaying six different emotions (happiness, inspiration, neutral, anger, fear, and sadness). The frequency domain feature matrix of EEG signals, which comprise power spectral density (PSD) and differential entropy (DE), were up-sampled using cubic spline interpolation to capture the correlation among different channels. To select emotion representation information from both global and localized brain regions, a novel method called Shifted EEG Channel Transformer (SECT) was proposed. The SECT method consists of two layers: the first layer utilizes the traditional channel Transformer (CT) structure to process information from global brain regions, while the second layer acquires localized information from centrally symmetrical and reorganized brain regions by shifted channel Transformer (S-CT). We conducted a subject-dependent experiment, and the accuracy of the PSD and DE features reached 82.51% and 84.76%, respectively, for the six kinds of emotion classification. Moreover, subject-independent experiments were conducted on a public dataset, yielding accuracies of 85.43% (3-classification, SEED), 66.83% (2-classification on Valence, DEAP), and 65.31% (2-classification on Arouse, DEAP), respectively.