An Efficient Mixture Model Approach in Brain-Machine Interface Systems for Extracting the Psychological Status of Mentally Impaired Persons Using EEG Signals

Abstract

We propose an efficient mixture classification technique, which uses electroencephalography (EEG) signals for establishing a communication channel for the physically challenged or immobilized people, by the usage of the brain signals. In order to identify the emotion expressions by an immobilized person, we introduce a novel approach for emotion recognition based on the generalized mixture distribution model. The main benefit of utilizing this model is that it is an asymmetric distribution, which helps to extract the EEG signals, which are either in symmetric or asymmetric form. The skew Gaussian distribution helps to identify the small duration EEG signal sample and helps toward better recognition of emotions in both clean and noisy EEG signals. The proposed method is particularly well suited for the high variability of the EEG signal allowing the emotions to be identified appropriately. The features of the brain signals are extracted by using cepstral coefficients. The extracted features are classified into different emotions using mixture classification techniques. In order to validate the model, six mentally impaired subjects are considered in the age group of 60-68, and an 8-channel EEG signal is utilized to collect the EEG signals under audio-visual stimuli. The basic emotions considered in this study include happy, sad, neutral, and boredom and an average emotion recognition accuracy of 89% is achieved.

Keywords

• Brain–computer interaction (BCI)
• emotion recognition
• affective computing
• electroencephalography (EEG)
• Gaussian mixture
• cepstral analysis