The integration of Deep Learning (DL) algorithms on brain signal analysis is still in its nascent stages compared to their success in fields like Computer Vision, especially in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), where the brain activity is decoded to control external devices without requiring muscle control. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a widely adopted choice for designing BCI systems due to its non-invasive and cost-effective nature and excellent temporal resolution. Still, it comes at the expense of limited training data, poor signal-to-noise, and a large variability across and within-subject recordings. Finally, setting up a BCI system with many electrodes takes a long time, hindering the widespread adoption of reliable DL architectures in BCIs outside research laboratories. To improve adoption, we need to improve user comfort using, for instance, reliable algorithms that operate with few electrodes. \textbf{Approach:} Our research aims to develop a DL algorithm that delivers effective results with a limited number of electrodes. Taking advantage of the Augmented Covariance Method with SPDNet, we propose the SPDNet$_{\psi}$ architecture and analyze its performance and computational impact, as well as the interpretability of the results. The evaluation is conducted on 5-fold cross-validation, using only three electrodes positioned above the Motor Cortex. The methodology was tested on nearly 100 subjects from several open-source datasets using the Mother Of All BCI Benchmark (MOABB) framework. \textbf{Main results:} The results of our SPDNet$_{\psi}$ demonstrate that the augmented approach combined with the SPDNet significantly outperforms all the current state-of-the-art DL architecture in MI decoding. \textbf{Significance:} This new architecture is explainable, with a low number of trainable parameters and a reduced carbon footprint.
Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are frequently used for various Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) tasks. While Deep Learning (DL) techniques have shown promising results, they are hindered by the substantial data requirements. By leveraging data from multiple subjects, transfer learning enables more effective training of DL models. A technique that is gaining popularity is Euclidean Alignment (EA) due to its ease of use, low computational complexity, and compatibility with Deep Learning models. However, few studies evaluate its impact on the training performance of shared and individual DL models. In this work, we systematically evaluate the effect of EA combined with DL for decoding BCI signals. We used EA to train shared models with data from multiple subjects and evaluated its transferability to new subjects. Our experimental results show that it improves decoding in the target subject by 4.33% and decreases convergence time by more than 70%. We also trained individual models for each subject to use as a majority-voting ensemble classifier. In this scenario, using EA improved the 3-model ensemble accuracy by 3.7%. However, when compared to the shared model with EA, the ensemble accuracy was 3.62% lower.
Electroencephalography (EEG) decoding is a challenging task due to the limited availability of labelled data. While transfer learning is a promising technique to address this challenge, it assumes that transferable data domains and task are known, which is not the case in this setting. This study investigates the transferability of deep learning representations between different EEG decoding tasks. We conduct extensive experiments using state-of-the-art decoding models on two recently released EEG datasets, ERP CORE and M$^3$CV, containing over 140 subjects and 11 distinct cognitive tasks. We measure the transferability of learned representations by pre-training deep neural networks on one task and assessing their ability to decode subsequent tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that, even with linear probing transfer, significant improvements in decoding performance can be obtained, with gains of up to 28% compare with the pure supervised approach. Additionally, we discover evidence that certain decoding paradigms elicit specific and narrow brain activities, while others benefit from pre-training on a broad range of representations. By revealing which tasks transfer well and demonstrating the benefits of transfer learning for EEG decoding, our findings have practical implications for mitigating data scarcity in this setting. The transfer maps generated also provide insights into the hierarchical relations between cognitive tasks, hence enhancing our understanding of how these tasks are connected from a neuroscientific standpoint.
In brain-computer interfaces (BCI), most of the approaches based on event-related potential (ERP) focus on the detection of P300, aiming for single trial classification for a speller task. While this is an important objective, existing P300 BCI still require several repetitions to achieve a correct classification accuracy. Signal processing and machine learning advances in P300 BCI mostly revolve around the P300 detection part, leaving the character classification out of the scope. To reduce the number of repetitions while maintaining a good character classification, it is critical to embrace the full classification problem. We introduce an end-to-end pipeline, starting from feature extraction, and is composed of an ERP-level classification using probabilistic Riemannian MDM which feeds a character-level classification using Bayesian accumulation of confidence across trials. Whereas existing approaches only increase the confidence of a character when it is flashed, our new pipeline, called Bayesian accumulation of Riemannian probabilities (ASAP), update the confidence of each character after each flash. We provide the proper derivation and theoretical reformulation of this Bayesian approach for a seamless processing of information from signal to BCI characters. We demonstrate that our approach performs significantly better than standard methods on public P300 datasets.
Transfer learning and meta-learning offer some of the most promising avenues to unlock the scalability of healthcare and consumer technologies driven by biosignal data. This is because current methods cannot generalise well across human subjects' data and handle learning from different heterogeneously collected data sets, thus limiting the scale of training data. On the other side, developments in transfer learning would benefit significantly from a real-world benchmark with immediate practical application. Therefore, we pick electroencephalography (EEG) as an exemplar for what makes biosignal machine learning hard. We design two transfer learning challenges around diagnostics and Brain-Computer-Interfacing (BCI), that have to be solved in the face of low signal-to-noise ratios, major variability among subjects, differences in the data recording sessions and techniques, and even between the specific BCI tasks recorded in the dataset. Task 1 is centred on the field of medical diagnostics, addressing automatic sleep stage annotation across subjects. Task 2 is centred on Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI), addressing motor imagery decoding across both subjects and data sets. The BEETL competition with its over 30 competing teams and its 3 winning entries brought attention to the potential of deep transfer learning and combinations of set theory and conventional machine learning techniques to overcome the challenges. The results set a new state-of-the-art for the real-world BEETL benchmark.
Calibration is still an important issue for user experience in Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). Common experimental designs often involve a lengthy training period that raises the cognitive fatigue, before even starting to use the BCI. Reducing or suppressing this subject-dependent calibration is possible by relying on advanced machine learning techniques, such as transfer learning. Building on Riemannian BCI, we present a simple and effective scheme to train a classifier on data recorded from different subjects, to reduce the calibration while preserving good performances. The main novelty of this paper is to propose a unique approach that could be applied on very different paradigms. To demonstrate the robustness of this approach, we conducted a meta-analysis on multiple datasets for three BCI paradigms: event-related potentials (P300), motor imagery and SSVEP. Relying on the MOABB open source framework to ensure the reproducibility of the experiments and the statistical analysis, the results clearly show that the proposed approach could be applied on any kind of BCI paradigm and in most of the cases to significantly improve the classifier reliability. We point out some key features to further improve transfer learning methods.
Functional connectivity is a key approach to investigate oscillatory activities of the brain that provides important insights on the underlying dynamic of neuronal interactions and that is mostly applied for brain activity analysis. Building on the advances in information geometry for brain-computer interface, we propose a novel framework that combines functional connectivity estimators and covariance-based pipelines to classify mental states, such as motor imagery. A Riemannian classifier is trained for each estimator and an ensemble classifier combines the decisions in each feature space. A thorough assessment of the functional connectivity estimators is provided and the best performing pipeline, called FUCONE, is evaluated on different conditions and datasets. Using a meta-analysis to aggregate results across datasets, FUCONE performed significantly better than all state-of-the-art methods. The performance gain is mostly imputable to the improved diversity of the feature spaces, increasing the robustness of the ensemble classifier with respect to the inter- and intra-subject variability.
This short technical report describes the approach submitted to the Clinical BCI Challenge-WCCI2020. This submission aims to classify motor imagery task from EEG signals and relies on Riemannian Geometry, with a twist. Instead of using the classical covariance matrices, we also rely on measures of functional connectivity. Our approach ranked 1st on the task 1 of the competition.
Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a recent construction process based on a 3D model, containing every component related to the building achievement. Architects, structure engineers, method engineers, and others participant to the building process work on this model through the design-to-construction cycle. The high complexity and the large amount of information included in these models raise several issues, delaying its wide adoption in the industrial world. One of the most important is the visualization: professionals have difficulties to find out the relevant information for their job. Actual solutions suffer from two limitations: the BIM models information are processed manually and insignificant information are simply hidden, leading to inconsistencies in the building model. This paper describes a system relying on an ontological representation of the building information to label automatically the building elements. Depending on the user's department, the visualization is modified according to these labels by automatically adjusting the colors and image properties based on a saliency model. The proposed saliency model incorporates several adaptations to fit the specificities of architectural images.
Riemannian geometry has been applied to Brain Computer Interface (BCI) for brain signals classification yielding promising results. Studying electroencephalographic (EEG) signals from their associated covariance matrices allows a mitigation of common sources of variability (electronic, electrical, biological) by constructing a representation which is invariant to these perturbations. While working in Euclidean space with covariance matrices is known to be error-prone, one might take advantage of algorithmic advances in information geometry and matrix manifold to implement methods for Symmetric Positive-Definite (SPD) matrices. This paper proposes a comprehensive review of the actual tools of information geometry and how they could be applied on covariance matrices of EEG. In practice, covariance matrices should be estimated, thus a thorough study of all estimators is conducted on real EEG dataset. As a main contribution, this paper proposes an online implementation of a classifier in the Riemannian space and its subsequent assessment in Steady-State Visually Evoked Potential (SSVEP) experimentations.