A Motor-Imagery BCI System Based on Deep Learning Networks and Its Applications

Abstract

Motor imagery brain-computer interface (BCI) by using of deep-learning models is pro- posed in this paper. In which, we used the electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of motor imagery (MI-EEG) to identify different imagery activities. The brain dynamics of motor imagery are usually measured by EEG as non-stationary time series of low signal-to-noise ratio. However, a variety of methods have been previously developed to classify MI-EEG signals getting not satisfactory results owing to lack of characteristics in time-frequency features. In this paper, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) was applied to transform MIEEG signals and extract their effective coefficients as the time-frequency features. Then two deep learning (DL) models named Long-short term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent neu- ral networks (GRNN) are used to classify MI-EEG data. LSTM is designed to fight against vanishing gradients. GRNN makes each recurrent unit to capture dependencies of differ - ent time scales adaptively. Similar scheme of the LSTM unit, GRNN has gating units that modulate the flow of information inside the unit, but without having a separate memory cells. Experimental results show that GRNN and LSTM yield higher classification accura-cies compared to the existing approaches that is helpful for the further research and applica- tion of relative RNN in processing of MI-EEG.