An automatic channel selection method based on the standard deviation of wavelet coefficients for motor imagery based brain–computer interfacing

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Abstract
The redundant data in multichannel electroencephalogram (EEG) signals significantly reduces the performance of brain–computer interface (BCI) systems. By removing redundant channels, a channel selection strategy increases the classification accuracy of BCI systems. In this work, a novel channel selection method (stdWC) based on the standard deviation of wavelet coefficients across channels is proposed to identify Motor Imagery (MI) based EEG signals. The wavelet coefficients are calculated by employing a Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) filter bank to decompose each trial from the EEG channel. The wavelet coefficient's standard deviation values are obtained across the channels, and these values are then sorted to determine the EEG channels with the highest standard deviation values. The channels with the largest wavelet coefficient divergence are chosen. MI trials are then spatially filtered with the Common Spatial Pattern (CSP), and CWT filter bank‐based 2D images are generated from the spatially filtered trials. These images are then classified using a unique nine‐layered convolutional neural network (CNN) model that combines two feature maps acquired with differing filter sizes. The proposed framework (stdWC‐CSP‐CNN) is evaluated using kappa score and classification accuracy on two publically accessible datasets (BCI Competition III dataset IVa and BCI Competition IV dataset 2a). The suggested framework achieved a mean test classification accuracy of 88.8% for dataset IVa from BCI Competition III and 75.03% for dataset 2a from BCI Competition IV, according to the results. The proposed channel selection method outperforms the other channel selection methods examined, according to the results. By rejecting redundant channels, the whole framework can improve the performance of MI‐based BCIs.

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