Investigation on Robustness of EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems tend to suffer from performance degradation due to the presence of noise and artifacts in EEG data. This study is aimed at systematically investigating the robustness of state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning based EEG-BCI models for motor imagery classification against simulated channel-specific noise in EEG data, at various low values of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Our results illustrate higher robustness of deep learning based MI classification models compared to the traditional machine learning based model, while identifying a set of channels with large sensitivity to simulated channel-specific noise. The EEGNet is relatively more robust towards channel-specific noise than Shallow ConvNet and FBCSP. We propose a preliminary solution, based on activation function, to improve the robustness of the deep learning models. By using saturating nonlinearities, the percentage drop in classification accuracy for SNR of -18 dB had reduced from 10.99% to 6.53% for EEGNet and 14.05% to 3.57% for Shallow ConvNet. Through this study, we emphasize the need for a more precise solution for enhancing the robustness, and thereby usability of EEG-BCI systems.