Motor Imagery EEG Classification Based on Riemannian Sparse Optimization and Dempster-Shafer Fusion of Multi-Time-Frequency Patterns

Motor imagery-based brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCIs) features are generally extracted from a wide fixed frequency band and time window of EEG signal. The performance suffers from individual differences in corresponding time to MI tasks. In order to solve the problem, in this study, we propose a novel method named Riemannian sparse optimization and Dempster-Shafer fusion of multi-time-frequency patterns (RSODSF) to enhance the decoding efficiency. First, we effectively combine the Riemannian geometry of the spatial covariance matrix with sparse optimization to extract more robust and distinct features. Second, the Dempster-Shafer theory is introduced and used to fuse each time window after sparse optimization of Riemannian features. Besides, the probabilistic values of the support vector machine (SVM) are obtained and transformed to effectively fuse multiple classifiers to leverage potential soft information of multiple trained SVM. The open-access BCI Competition IV dataset IIa and Competition III dataset IIIa are employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed RSODSF. It achieves higher average accuracy (89.7% and 96.8%) than state-of-the-art methods. The improvement over the common spatial patterns (SFBCSP) are respectively 9.9% and 12.4% (p < 0.01, paired t-test). These results show that our proposed RSODSF method is a promising candidate for the performance improvement of MI-BCI.