Classification of EEG Signals Based on Image Representation of Statistical Features

Abstract

This work presents an image classification approach to EEG brainwave classification. The proposed method is based on the representation of temporal and statistical features as a 2D image, which is then classified using a deep Convolutional Neural Network. A three-class mental state problem is investigated, in which subjects experience either relaxation, concentration, or neutral states. Using publicly available EEG data from a Muse Electroencephalography headband, a large number of features describing the wave are extracted, and subsequently reduced to 256 based on the Information Gain measure. These 256 features are then normalised and reshaped into a 16 × 16 grid, which can be expressed as a grayscale image. A deep Convolutional Neural Network is then trained on this data in order to classify the mental state of subjects. The proposed method obtained an out-of-sample classification accuracy of 89.38%, which is competitive with the 87.16% of the current best method from a previous work.