STAND-Net: A Spiking Temporal Attention autoeNcoDer Network for Efficient EEG Artifact Removal

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain–computer interface (BCI) systems hold significant promise across diverse applications; however, their performance is compromised by pervasive physiological artifacts that degrade signal fidelity. While current deep neural networks (DNNs) improve artifact rejection, their high computational cost precludes deployment in wearable BCIs systems. Here, we introduce STAND-Net (Spiking Temporal Attention autoeNcoDer Network), a neuromorphic architecture that leverages event-driven spiking neurons to achieve ultra-efficient, high-fidelity EEG artifact removal. STAND-Net combines a spike-convolution encoder-decoder with leaky integrate-and-fire neurons to model spatiotemporal EEG dynamics, a dilation-enhanced residual backbone capturing long-range dependencies, and a spike-rate attention mechanism dynamically localizing artifacts via neuronal firing patterns. The system demonstrates >3.7 dB improvement in signal-to-distortion ratio over state-of-the-art methods across diverse artifacts while consuming 97.98% less power than comparable DNNs. Crucially, downstream BCI classification accuracy increased by 6.64% using STAND-Net-processed signals. This work establishes a neuromorphic framework for low-power and high quality EEG artifact removal in wearable BCI systems.