CCA-based Spatio-temporal Filtering for Enhancing SSVEP Detection

Brain-computer interface (BCI) can provide a direct communication path between the human brain and an external device. The steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based BCI has been widely explored in the past decades due to its high signal-to-noise ratio and fast communication rate. Several spatial filtering methods have been developed for frequency detection. However the temporal knowledge contained in the SSVEP signal is not effectively utilized. In this study, we propose a canonical correlation analysis (CCA)-based spatio-temporal filtering method to improve target classification. The training signal and two types of template signals (i.e. individual template and artificial sine-cosine reference) are first augmented via temporal information. Three sets of augmented data are then concatenated by trials. The CCA is performed twice, between the newly obtained training data and each template. The trained four spatial filters can be applied in the following test process. A public benchmark dataset was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method and the other three comparing methods, such as CCA, MsetCCA, and TRCA. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method yields significantly higher performance. This paper also explored the effects of the number of electrodes and training blocks on classification accuracy. The results further demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in SSVEP detection.