Deep Autoencoder for Real-Time Single-Channel EEG Cleaning and Its Smartphone Implementation Using TensorFlow Lite...

To remove signal contamination in electroencephalogram (EEG) traces coming from ocular, motion, and muscular artifacts which degrade signal quality. To do this in real-time, with low computational overhead, on a mobile platform in a channel count independent manner to enable portable Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) applications.

We propose a Deep AutoEncoder (DAE) neural network for single-channel EEG artifact removal, and implement it on a smartphone via TensorFlow Lite. Delegate based acceleration is employed to allow real-time, low computational resource operation. Artifact removal performance is quantified by comparing corrupted and ground-truth clean EEG data from public datasets for a range of artifact types. The on-phone computational resources required are also measured when processing pre-saved data.

DAE cleaned EEG shows high correlations with ground-truth clean EEG, with average Correlation Coefficients of 0.96, 0.85, 0.70 and 0.79 for clean EEG reconstruction, and EOG, motion, and EMG artifact removal respectively. On-smartphone tests show the model processes a 4 s EEG window within 5 ms, substantially outperforming a comparison FastICA artifact removal algorithm.

The proposed DAE model shows effectiveness in single-channel EEG artifact removal. This is the first demonstration of a low-computational resource deep learning model for mobile EEG in smartphones with hardware/software acceleration.

This work enables portable BCIs which require low latency real-time artifact removal, and potentially operation with a small number of EEG channels for wearability. It makes use of the artificial intelligence accelerators found in modern smartphones to improve computational performance compared to previous artifact removal approaches.