Improving the Cross-Subject Performance of the ERP-Based Brain–Computer Interface Using Rapid Serial Visual Presentation and Correlation Analysis Rank

The brain–computer interface (BCI) is a system that is designed to provide communication channels to anyone through a computer. Initially, it was suggested to help the disabled, but actually had been proposed a wider range of applications. However, the cross-subject recognition in BCI systems is difficult to break apart from the individual specific characteristics, unsteady characteristics, and environmental specific characteristics, which also makes it difficult to develop highly reliable and highly stable BCI systems. Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) is one of the most recent spellers with a clean, unified background and a single stimulus, which may evoke event-related potential (ERP) patterns with less individual difference. In order to build a BCI system that allows new users to use it directly without calibration or with less calibration time, RSVP was employed as evoked paradigm, then correlation analysis rank (CAR) algorithm was proposed to improve the cross-individual classification and simultaneously use as less training data as possible. Fifty-eight subjects took part in the experiments. The flash stimulation time is 200 ms, and the off time is 100 ms. The P300 component was locked to the target representation by time. The results showed that RSVP could evoke more similar ERP patterns among subjects compared with matrix paradigm. Then, the included angle cosine was calculated and counted for averaged ERP waveform between each two subjects. The average matching number of all subjects was 6 for the matrix paradigm, while for the RSVP paradigm, the average matching number range was 20 when the threshold value was set to 0.5, more than three times as much larger, quantificationally indicating that ERP waveforms evoked by the RSVP paradigm produced smaller individual differences, and it is more favorable for cross-subject classification. Information transfer rates (ITR) were also calculated for RSVP and matrix paradigms, and the RSVP paradigm got the average ITR of 43.18 bits/min, which was 13% higher than the matrix paradigm. Then, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve value was computed and compared using the proposed CAR algorithm and traditional random selection. The results showed that the proposed CAR got significantly better performance than the traditional random selection and got the best AUC value of 0.8, while the traditional random selection only achieved 0.65. These encouraging results suggest that with proper evoked paradigm and classification methods, it is feasible to get stable performance across subjects for ERP-based BCI. Thus, our findings provide a new approach to improve BCI performances.