Enhancing performance of subject-specific models via subject-independent information for SSVEP-based BCIs
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Recently, steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) has attracted much attention due to its high information transfer rate (ITR) and increasing number of targets. However, the performance of SSVEP-based methods in terms of accuracy and time length required for target detection can be improved. We propose a new canonical correlation analysis (CCA)-based method to integrate subject-specific models and subject-independent information and enhance BCI performance. To optimize hyperparameters for CCA-based model of a specific subject, we propose to use training data of other subjects. An ensemble version of the proposed method is also developed and used for a fair comparison with ensemble task-related component analysis (TRCA). A publicly available 35-subject SSVEP benchmark dataset is used to evaluate different methods. The proposed method is compared with TRCA and extended CCA methods as reference methods. The performance of the methods is evaluated using classification accuracy and ITR. Offline analysis results show that the proposed method reaches highest ITR compared with TRCA and extended CCA. Also, the proposed method significantly improves performance of extended CCA in all conditions and TRCA for time windows greater than 0.3 s. In addition, the proposed method outperforms TRCA for low number of training blocks and electrodes. This study illustrates that adding subject-independent information to subject-specific models can improve the performance of SSVEP-based BCIs.
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