Electroencephalography-based imagined speech recognition using deep long short-term memory network

Abstract

This article proposes a subject-independent application of brain–computer interfacing (BCI). A 32-channel Electroencephalography (EEG) device is used to measure imagined speech (SI) of four words (sos, stop, medicine, washroom) and one phrase (come-here) across 13 subjects. A deep long short-term memory (LSTM) network has been adopted to recognize the above signals in seven EEG frequency bands individually in nine major regions of the brain. The results show a maximum accuracy of 73.56% and a network prediction time (NPT) of 0.14 s which are superior to other state-of-the-art techniques in the literature. Our analysis reveals that the alpha band can recognize SI better than other EEG frequencies. To reinforce our findings, the above work has been compared by models based on the gated recurrent unit (GRU), convolutional neural network (CNN), and six conventional classifiers. The results show that the LSTM model has 46.86% more average accuracy in the alpha band and 74.54% less average NPT than CNN. The maximum accuracy of GRU was 8.34% less than the LSTM network. Deep networks performed better than traditional classifiers.