Transformed common spatial pattern for motor imagery-based brain-computer interfaces

OBJECTIVE: The motor imagery (MI)-based brain–computer interface (BCI) is one of the most popular BCI paradigms. Common spatial pattern (CSP) is an effective algorithm for decoding MI-related electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns. However, it highly depends on the selection of EEG frequency bands. To address this problem, previous researchers often used a filter bank to decompose EEG signals into multiple frequency bands before applying the traditional CSP. APPROACH: This study proposed a novel method, i.e., transformed common spatial pattern (tCSP), to extract the discriminant EEG features from multiple frequency bands after but not before CSP. To verify its effectiveness, we tested tCSP on a dataset collected by our team and a public dataset from BCI competition III. We also performed an online evaluation of the proposed method. MAIN RESULTS: As a result, for the dataset collected by our team, the classification accuracy of tCSP was significantly higher than CSP by about 8% and filter bank CSP (FBCSP) by about 4.5%. The combination of tCSP and CSP further improved the system performance with an average accuracy of 84.77% and a peak accuracy of 100%. For dataset IVa in BCI competition III, the combination method got an average accuracy of 94.55%, which performed best among all the presented CSP-based methods. In the online evaluation, tCSP and the combination method achieved an average accuracy of 80.00 and 84.00%, respectively. SIGNIFICANCE: The results demonstrate that the frequency band selection after CSP is better than before for MI-based BCIs. This study provides a promising approach for decoding MI EEG patterns, which is significant for the development of BCIs.