Motor intention recognition in EEG: In pursuit of a relevant feature set

Abstract

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on electroencephalograms (EEG) are a noninvasive and cheap alternative to get a communication channel between brain and computers. Some of the main issues with EEG signals are its high dimensionality, high inter-user variance, and non-stationarity. In this work we present different approaches to deal with the high dimensionality of the data, finding relevant descriptors in EEG signals for motor intention recognition: first, a classical dimensionality reduction method using Diffusion Distance, second a technique based on spectral analysis of EEG channels associated with the frontal and prefrontal cortex, and third a projection over average signals. Performance analysis for different sets of features is done, showing that some of them are more robust to user variability. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.