METHOD

Improving eye-brain-computer interface performance by using EEG frequency components

Shishkin SL1, Kozyrskiy BL1,3, Trofimov AG1,3, Nuzhdin YO1, Fedorova AA1, Svirin EP1, Velichkovsky BM2
About authors

1 Department of Neurocognitive Technologies, Kurchatov Complex of NBICS Technologies,
National Research Centre Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, Russia

2 Kurchatov Complex of NBICS Technologies,
National Research Centre Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, Russia

3 Faculty of Cybernetics and Information Security,
National Research Nuclear University MEPhI, Moscow, Russia

Correspondence should be addressed: Sergey Shishkin
pl. Akademika Kurchatova, d. 1, Moscow, Russia, 123182; ur.liam@nikghsihsgres

About paper

Funding: this work was partially supported by the Russian Science Foundation, grant no. 14-28-00234 (acquisition and preprocessing of experimental data), and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, grant no. 15-29-01344 (evaluation of wavelet features significance for classification).

Received: 2016-04-08 Accepted: 2016-04-15 Published online: 2017-01-05
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Eye-brain-computer interfaces (EBCIs) could combine the advantages of eye tracking systems used for operating technical devices and brain-computer interfaces. Such systems are intended for both patients with various motor impairments and healthy individuals. The effectiveness of EBCIs is largely dependent on their ability to detect the user’s intent to give a command on the encephalogram (EEG) recorded during gaze fixation, that is, just within hundreds of milliseconds. These strict requirements necessitate a full use of data contained in EEG for more accurate classification of gaze fixations as spontaneous and “control”. This work describes our attempt to use for classification not only amplitude statistical features, but also wavelet features specific to oscillatory EEG components within the interval of 50-500 ms from gaze fixation onset. Integral index of classification accuracy AUC significantly depended on the feature set, reaching the highest value (0.75, average over the group of 8 participants) for the combined amplitude and wavelet set. We believe that further improvement of this method will facilitate the practical application of EBCIs.

Keywords: classification, brain-computer interface, electroencephalogram, eye-brain-computer interface, EEG, gaze-based control, control gaze fixation, eye tracking, video-oculography, wavelets

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