Independent component analysis-based spatial filtering improves template-based SSVEP detection

This study proposes a new algorithm to detect steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) based on a template-matching approach combined with independent component analysis (ICA)-based spatial filtering. In recent studies, the effectiveness of the template-based SSVEP detection has been demonstrated in a high-speed brain-computer interface (BCI). Since SSVEPs can be considered as electroencephalogram (EEG) signals generated from underlying brain sources independent from other activities and artifacts, ICA has great potential to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of SSVEPs by separating them from artifacts. This study proposes to apply the ICA-based spatial filters to test data and individual templates obtained by averaging training trials, and then to use the correlation coefficients between the filtered data and templates as features for SSVEP classification. This study applied the proposed method to a 40-class SSVEP dataset to evaluate its classification accuracy against those obtained by conventional canonical correlation analysis (CCA)- and extended CCA-based methods. The study results showed that the ICA-based method outperformed the other methods in terms of the classification accuracy. Furthermore, its computational time was comparable to the CCA-based method, and was much shorter than that of the extended CCA-based method.