Time-resolved EEG signal analysis for motor imagery activity recognition

Accurately characterizing brain activity requires detailed feature analysis in the temporal, spatial, and spectral domains. While previous research has proposed various spatial and spectral feature extraction methods to distinguish between different cognitive tasks, temporal feature analysis for each separate brain region and frequency band has been largely overlooked. This study introduces two novel approaches for recognizing cognitive activity: temporal entropic profiling and time-aligned common spatio-spectral patterns analysis. These approaches capture and use discriminative short-lived signal segments for motor imagery activity recognition. In Approach-1, we evaluated nine different measures to determine timing parameters that showed altered behavior associated with maximal inter-activity differences, which we then used in a machine-learning framework. In Approach-2, we used the best-performing signal characteristic measures from Approach-1 to determine the optimum latency of each channel at each frequency band for a CSP-based activity recognition strategy. We evaluated both approaches on two online available motor imagery EEG datasets and achieved average recognition accuracy levels of 86%. We compared our methods with four established BCI methods. The performance results show that our approaches exceeded the benchmark methods' performances, with notable improvements in the proposed time-aligned common spatio-spectral patterns approach. This study demonstrates that motor imagery recognition performance is improved when a temporal analysis is adopted alongside spatio-spectral neural feature analysis and that timing parameters associated with the maximal entropic difference of EEG segments to the cognitive tasks varied between different brain regions and subjects.