Transferring Shared Responses Across Electrode Montages for Facilitating Calibration in High-Speed Brain Spellers

Recent studies have shown that using the user's average steady-state visual evoked responses (SSVEPs) as the template to template-matching methods could significantly improve the accuracy and speed of the SSVEP-based brain-computer interface (BCI). However, collecting the pilot data for each individual can be time-consuming. To resolve this practical issue, this study aims to explore the feasibility of leveraging pre-recorded datasets from the same users by transferring common electroencephalogram (EEG) responses across different sessions with the same or different electrode montages. The proposed method employs spatial filtering techniques including response averaging, canonical correlation analysis (CCA), and task-related component analysis (TRCA) to project scalp EEG recordings onto a shared response domain. The transferability was evaluated by using 40-class SSVEPs recorded from eight subjects with nine electrodes on two different days. Three subsets of electrode montages were selected to simulate different scenarios such as identical, partly overlapped, and non-overlapped electrode placements across two sessions. The target identification accuracy of the proposed methods with transferred training data significantly outperformed a conventional training-free algorithm. The result suggests training data required in the BCI speller could be transferred from different EEG montages and/or headsets.