An Effective Zeros-Time Windowing Strategy to Detect Sensorimotor Rhythms Related to Motor Imagery EEG Signals

Brain-computer interface (BCI) acquires, analyzes and transforms human brain activity to control commands allowing as such disabled people to communicate or control external devices. A motor imagery-based BCI enables patients to control artificial peripherals and communicate with the outside world by merely thinking of the task such as, e.g., the imagination of left-hand, right-hand, or foot movement. The mere intention of moving one of the limbs triggers neural activity, which is induced in the primary sensorimotor areas like that observed with real executed movements. Tracking generated sensorimotor rhythms (SMRs) and extracting robust and informative features from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are challenging due to the time-varying nature of EEG signals and the inter-human variability. In this paper, we proposed an EEG-zeros-time windowing (E2ZTW) approach based on a highly decaying window function to track SMRs and identify the temporal epochs containing useful information without any prior information on the trigger. The proposed approach involves the application of the group-delay function, allowing the improvement of the spectral resolution due to the additive property of the function on individual resonances. Some algorithms were integrated into the proposed approach, such as the common spatial pattern algorithm, which is used to extract features and linear discriminant analysis and a convolutional neural network, which are used for the classification of the features. The effectiveness of the proposed approach in tracking the SMRs rhythms is evaluated in terms of accuracy. Experiments were performed on three public datasets provided by BCI competition for 17 subjects. Following experimental results, it is shown that discrimination between the left- and right-hand movements can be achieved within a few seconds with high classification accuracy. As compared to other state-of-art techniques, the proposed approach achieves an average classification accuracy and standard error values of 82% and 13, respectively, thereby outperforming existing algorithm by an accuracy mean of 2%.