Title: Converting Your Thoughts to Texts: Enabling Brain Typing via Deep Feature Learning of EEG Signals,
Abstract: An electroencephalography (EEG) based Brain Computer Interface (BCI) enables
people to communicate with the outside world by interpreting the EEG signals of
their brains to interact with devices such as wheelchairs and intelligent
robots. More specifically, motor imagery EEG (MI-EEG), which reflects a
subjects active intent, is attracting increasing attention for a variety of BCI
applications. Accurate classification of MI-EEG signals while essential for
effective operation of BCI systems, is challenging due to the significant noise
inherent in the signals and the lack of informative correlation between the
signals and brain activities. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural
network based learning framework that affords perceptive insights into the
relationship between the MI-EEG data and brain activities. We design a joint
convolutional recurrent neural network that simultaneously learns robust
high-level feature presentations through low-dimensional dense embeddings from
raw MI-EEG signals. We also employ an Autoencoder layer to eliminate various
artifacts such as background activities. The proposed approach has been
evaluated extensively on a large- scale public MI-EEG dataset and a limited but
easy-to-deploy dataset collected in our lab. The results show that our approach
outperforms a series of baselines and the competitive state-of-the- art
methods, yielding a classification accuracy of 95.53%. The applicability of our
proposed approach is further demonstrated with a practical BCI system for
typing.