Multiscale time-frequency method for multiclass Motor Imagery Brain Computer Interface

Motor Imagery Brain Computer Interface (MI-BCI) has become a promising technology in the field of neurorehabilitation. However, the performance and computational complexity of the current multiclass MI-BCI have not been fully optimized, and the intuitive interpretation of individual differences on motor imagery tasks is seldom investigated. In this paper, a well-designed multiscale time-frequency segmentation scheme is first applied to multichannel EEG recordings to obtain Time-Frequency Segments (TFSs). Then, the TFS selection based on a specific wrapper feature selection rule is utilized to determine optimum TFSs. Next, One-Versus-One (OvO)-divCSP implemented in divergence framework is used to extract discriminative features. Finally, One Versus-Rest (OvR)-SVM is utilized to predict the class label based on selected multiclass MI features. Experimental results indicate our method yields a superior performance on two publicly available multiclass MI datasets with a mean accuracy of 80.00% and a mean kappa of 0.73. Meanwhile, the proposed TFS selection method can significantly alleviate the computational burden with little accuracy reduction, demonstrating the feasibility of real-time multiclass MI-BCI. Furthermore, the Motor Imagery Time-Frequency Reaction Map (MITFRM) is visualized, contributing to analyzing and interpreting the performance differences between different subjects.