Removal of eye blink artifacts from EEG signal using morphological modeling and orthogonal projection

Abstract

The presence of artifacts in the EEG signals can cause a misunderstanding of the sought neurophysiological phenomena. In particular, the eye blink artifacts frequently contaminate the EEG and deteriorate its quality. Unfortunately, removing this artifact can lose useful information. The most popular approach in this field uses the independent component analysis to decompose the signal into different independent components and then eliminate those that are related to the artifact. Despite its reputation, this approach is computationally intensive, requires an acquisition from large number of channels and can alter the original EEG signal. In this paper, we propose a new method for blink artifact reduction. Several reference signals representing the eye blink are created then used in an orthogonal projection in order to cancel the artifact. The results of experiments, using 54 datasets from 27 subjects, show that the proposed method significantly outperformed the standard ADJUST, MARA and SASICA methods in removing the artifacts while preserving the pure EEG signals.