A Multibranch of Convolutional Neural Network Models for Electroencephalogram-Based Motor Imagery Classification

Automatic high-level feature extraction has become a possibility with the advancement of deep learning, and it has been used to optimize efficiency. Recently, classification methods for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based electroencephalography (EEG) motor imagery have been proposed, and have achieved reasonably high classification accuracy. These approaches, however, use the CNN single convolution scale, whereas the best convolution scale varies from subject to subject. This limits the precision of classification. This paper proposes multibranch CNN models to address this issue by effectively extracting the spatial and temporal features from raw EEG data, where the branches correspond to different filter kernel sizes. The proposed method’s promising performance is demonstrated by experimental results on two public datasets, the BCI Competition IV 2a dataset and the High Gamma Dataset (HGD). The results of the technique show a 9.61% improvement in the classification accuracy of multibranch EEGNet (MBEEGNet) from the fixed one-branch EEGNet model, and 2.95% from the variable EEGNet model. In addition, the multibranch ShallowConvNet (MBShallowConvNet) improved the accuracy of a single-scale network by 6.84%. The proposed models outperformed other state-of-the-art EEG motor imagery classification methods.