Minimum Noise Estimate Filter: A Novel Automated Artifacts Removal Method for Field Potentials

In this paper a novel automated and unsupervised method for removing artifacts from multichannel field potential signals is introduced which can be used in brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. The method, which is called minimum noise estimate filter is based on an iterative thresholding followed by Rayleigh quotient which tries to find an estimate of the noise and to minimize it over the original signal. MNE filter is capable to operate without any prior information about field potential signals. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by its application on two different type of signals namely electrocorticogram and electroencephalogram datasets through a decoding procedure. The results indicate that the proposed method outperforms well-known artifacts removal techniques such as common average referencing, Laplacian method, independent component analysis and wavelet denoising approach.