Optimal channel selection for EEG-based enhanced brain robot interface for autonomous wheelchair

Abstract

Creating an autonomous wheelchair system based on EEG (electroencephalogram) signals is a fascinating and challenging concept. In non-invasive Brain robot Interface (BRI), scalp EEG signals acquired from the multiple channels come with different artifact types, majorly as an electrooculogram (EoG). Also, all the channels don't carry equally important information regarding the particular motor activities. The primary contribution of this paper is to denoise the EEG signal and then find the optimal channels to achieve the most informative EEG signals for the motor activity recognition. Thus, this research proposes a model where firstly t he E oG a rtifacts h ave b een removed from EEG signals with the regression method and other noises with Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). Secondly, It proposes a model of selecting optimal channels using a hybrid feature selection process, which includes a filter a nd w rapper method using sequential floating forward search (SFFS). Maximum Class Separability (MCS) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), both have been used for evaluating the channels. Then again SVM has been applied for classifying the motor activities by the signals recorded from the optimal channels. A dataset with four classes of human motor activities has been used for evaluating the whole proposed model. This proposed model shows the highest accuracy of 84.15% for the optimal channel set with Standard Deviation (STD) feature among other optimal channel sets of features.