Comparing user-dependent and user-independent training of CNN for SSVEP BCI

OBJECTIVE: We presented a comparative study on the training methodologies of a convolutional neural network (CNN) for the detection of steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP). Two training scenarios were also compared: user-independent (UI) training and user-dependent (UD) training. APPROACH: The CNN was trained in both UD and UI scenarios on two types of features for SSVEP classification: magnitude spectrum features (M-CNN) and complex spectrum features (C-CNN). The canonical correlation analysis (CCA), widely used in SSVEP processing, was used as the baseline. Additional comparisons were performed with task-related components analysis (TRCA) and filter-bank canonical correlation analysis (FBCCA). The performance of the proposed CNN pipelines, CCA, FBCCA and TRCA were evaluated with two datasets: a seven-class SSVEP dataset collected on 21 healthy participants and a twelve-class publicly available SSVEP dataset collected on ten healthy participants. MAIN RESULTS: The UD based training methods consistently outperformed the UI methods when all other conditions were the same, as one would expect. However, the proposed UI-C-CNN approach performed similarly to the UD-M-CNN across all cases investigated on both datasets. On Dataset 1, the average accuracies of the different methods for 1 s window length were: CCA: 69.1% ± 10.8%, TRCA: 13.4% ± 1.5%, FBCCA: 64.8% ± 15.6%, UI-M-CNN: 73.5% ± 16.1%, UI-C-CNN: 81.6% ± 12.3%, UD-M-CNN: 87.8% ± 7.6% and UD-C-CNN: 92.5% ± 5%. On Dataset 2, the average accuracies of the different methods for data length of 1 s were: UD-C-CNN: 92.33% ± 11.1%, UD-M-CNN: 82.77% ± 16.7%, UI-C-CNN: 81.6% ± 18%, UI-M-CNN: 70.5% ± 22%, FBCCA: 67.1% ± 21%, CCA: 62.7% ± 21.5%, TRCA: 40.4% ± 14%. Using t-SNE, visualizing the features extracted by the CNN pipelines further revealed that the C-CNN method likely learned both the amplitude and phase related information from the SSVEP data for classification, resulting in superior performance than the M-CNN methods. The results suggested that UI-C-CNN method proposed in this study offers a good balance between performance and cost of training data. SIGNIFICANCE: The proposed C-CNN based method is a suitable candidate for SSVEP-based BCIs and provides an improved performance in both UD and UI training scenarios.

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