Identification of ocular artifact in EEG signals using VMD and Hurst exponent

Electroencephalographic (EEG) readings are usually infected with unavoidable artifacts, especially physiological ones. One such physiological artifact is the ocular artifacts (OAs) that are generally related to eyes and are characterized by high magnitude and a specific spike pattern in the prefrontal region of the brain. During the long-duration EEG acquisition, the retrieval of important information becomes quite complicated in prefrontal regions as ocular artifacts dominate the EEG recorded, making it difficult to discern underlying brain activity.

With the progress and development in signal processing techniques, artifact handling has become a progressive field of investigation. This paper presents a framework for the detection and correction of ocular artifacts. This study emphasizes improving the quality and reducing the time complexity by using higher-order statistics (HOS) for artifact identification and variational mode decomposition (VMD) for OA correction.

An overall SNR of 14 dB, MAE of 0.09, and PSNR of 33.59 dB has been attained by the proposed framework.

It was observed that the proposed HOS-VMD surpassed the state-of-the-art mode decomposition techniques.