Task-Related Component Analysis Combining Paired Character Decoding for Miniature Asymmetric Visual Evoked Potentials

Abstract

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology based on event-related potentials (ERP) of electroencephalography (EEG) is widely used in daily life and medical treatment. However, the research of identifying the miniature and more informative asymmetric visual evoked potentials (aVEPs), which belongs to ERP, needs further exploration. Herein, a task-related component analysis combining paired character decoding (TRCA-PCD) method, which can enhance reproducibility of aVEPs in multiple trials and strengthen the features of different samples, was designed to realize fast decoding of aVEPs. The BCI performance and the influence of repetition times between the TRCA-PCD method, the discriminative canonical pattern matching (DCPM) method and traditional task-related component analysis (TRCA) method were compared using a 32-class aVEPs dataset recorded from 32 subjects. The highest average recognition accuracy and information transfer rate (ITR) of TRCA-PCD after parameter selection were $70.37~\pm ~2.49$ % (DCPM: $64.91~\pm ~2.81$ %, TRCA: $44.01~\pm ~3.25$ %) with the peak value of 97.92% and $28.90~\pm ~3.83$ bits/min (DCPM: $21.29~\pm ~3.35$ bits/min, TRCA: $11.54~\pm ~2.81$ bits/min) with the peak value of 94.55 bits/min respectively. Statistical analysis indicated that the highest average recognition rate could be obtained when the repetition time was six, and the highest ITR could be obtained when the repetition time was one. Overall, the results verified the effectiveness and superiority of TRCA-PCD in recognition of aVEPs and provided a reference for parameter selection. Therefore, the TRCA-PCD method can promote the further application of aVEPs in the BCI speller field.

Keywords

• Brain-computer interfaces (BCI)
• event-related potential (ERP)
• task-related component analysis (TRCA)
• paired character decoding (PCD)
• asymmetric visual evoked potentials (aVEPs)