Spatial smoothing of canonical correlation analysis for steady state visual evoked potential based brain computer interfaces

Brain computer interface (BCI) is a system for communication between people and computers via brain activity. Steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), a brain response observed in EEG, are evoked by flickering stimuli. SSVEP is one of the promising paradigms for BCI. Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is widely used for EEG signal processing in SSVEP-based BCIs. However, the classification accuracy of CCA with short signal length is low. In order to solve the problem, we propose a regularization which works in such a way that the CCA spatial filter becomes spatially smooth to give robustness in short signal length condition. The spatial filter is designed in a parameter space spanned by a spatially smooth basis which are given by a graph Fourier transform of three dimensional electrode coordinates. We compared the classification accuracy of the proposed regularized CCA with the standard CCA. The result shows that the proposed CCA outperforms the standard CCA in short signal length condition.