EEG emotion recognition based on an innovative information potential index

The recent exceptional demand for emotion recognition systems in clinical and non-medical applications has attracted the attention of many researchers. Since the brain is the primary object of understanding emotions and responding to them, electroencephalogram (EEG) signal analysis is one of the most popular approaches in affect classification. Previously, different approaches have been presented to benefit from brain connectivity information. We envisioned analyzing the interactions between brain electrodes with the information potential and providing a new index to quantify the connectivity matrix. The current study proposed a simple measure based on the cross-information potential between pairs of EEG electrodes to characterize emotions. This measure was tested for different EEG frequency bands to realize which EEG waves could be fruitful in recognizing emotions. Support vector machine and k-nearest neighbor (kNN) were implemented to classify four emotion categories based on two-dimensional valence and arousal space. Experimental results on the Database for Emotion Analysis using Physiological signals revealed a maximum accuracy of 90.14%, a sensitivity of 89.71%, and an F-score of 94.57% using kNN. The gamma frequency band obtained the highest recognition rates. Furthermore, low valence-low arousal was classified more effectively than other classes.