CIT-EmotionNet: convolution interactive transformer network for EEG emotion recognition

Emotion recognition is a significant research problem in affective computing as it has a lot of potential areas of application. One of the approaches in emotion recognition uses electroencephalogram (EEG) signals to identify the emotion of a person. However, effectively using the global and local features of EEG signals to improve the performance of emotion recognition is still a challenge. In this study, we propose a novel Convolution Interactive Transformer Network for EEG Emotion Recognition, known as CIT-EmotionNet, which efficiently integrates the global and local features of EEG signals. We convert the raw EEG signals into spatial-spectral representations, which serve as the inputs into the model. The model integrates convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer within a single framework in a parallel manner. We propose a Convolution Interactive Transformer module, which facilitates the interaction and fusion of local and global features extracted by CNN and Transformer respectively, thereby improving the average accuracy of emotion recognition. The proposed CIT-EmotionNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average recognition accuracy of 98.57% and 92.09% on two publicly available datasets, SEED and SEED-IV, respectively.