A Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Scheme for SSVEP-Based BCI System

The steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) has been widely used in building multi-target brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on electroencephalogram (EEG). However, methods for high-accuracy SSVEP systems require training data for each target, which needs significant calibration time. This study aimed to use the data of only part of the targets for training while achieving high classification accuracy on all targets. In this work, we proposed a generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) scheme for SSVEP classification. We divided the target classes into seen and unseen classes and trained the classifier only using the seen classes. During the test time, the search space contained both seen classes and unseen classes. In the proposed scheme, the EEG data and the sine waves are embedded into the same latent space using convolutional neural networks (CNN). We use the correlation coefficient of the two outputs in the latent space for classification. Our method was tested on two public datasets and reached 89.9% of the classification accuracy of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) data-driven method, which needs the training data of all targets. Compared to the SOTA training-free method, our method achieved a multifold improvement. This work shows that it is promising to build an SSVEP classification system that does not need the training data of all targets.