Hybrid approach in recognition of visual covert selective spatial attention based on MEG signals

Abstract

This paper proposes a reliable and efficient method for recognition in two different orientations (either left or right) by Magnetoencephalograph (MEG) signals. The brain activities are measured using different approaches with different spatial and temporal resolutions. The MEG signals are usually used for brain-computer interface (BCI) applications due to high temporal resolution. The MEG signals were recorded from different brain regions of four different human subjects during visual covert selective spatial attention task. The hybrid method proposes pre-processing; feature extraction by Hurst exponent, Morlet wavelet coefficients, and Petrosian fractal dimension; normalization; feature selection by p-value; and classification by support vector machine (SVM) and fuzzy support vector machine (FSVM). The results show that the proposed method can predict the location of the attended stimulus with a high accuracy of 91.62% and 92.28% for two different orientations with SVM and FSVM, respectively. Finally, these methods can be useful for BCI applications based on visual covert selective spatial attention.