Independent Low-Rank Matrix Analysis-Based Automatic Artifact Reduction Technique Applied to Three BCI Paradigms

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain--computer interfaces (BCIs) can potentially enable people to noninvasively and directly communicate with others using brain activities. Artifacts generated from body activities (e.g., eyeblinks and teeth clenches) often contaminate EEGs and make EEG-based classification/identification hard. Although independent component analysis (ICA) is the gold-standard technique for attenuating the effects of such contamination, the estimated independent components are still mixed with artifactual and neuronal information because ICA relies only on the independence assumption. The same problem occurs when using independent vector analysis (IVA), an extended ICA method. To solve this problem, we designed an independent low-rank matrix analysis (ILRMA)-based automatic artifact reduction technique that clearly models sources from observations under the independence assumption and a low-rank nature in the frequency domain. For automatic artifact reduction, we combined the signal separation technique with an independent component classifier for EEGs named ICLabel. To assess the comparative efficiency of the proposed method, the discriminabilities of artifact-reduced EEGs using ICA, IVA, and ILRMA were determined using an open-access EEG dataset named OpenBMI, which contains EEG data obtained through three BCI paradigms (motor-imagery (MI), event-related potential (ERP), and steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)). BCI performances were obtained using these three paradigms after applying artifact reduction techniques, and the results suggested that our proposed method has the potential to achieve higher discriminability than ICA and IVA for BCIs. In addition, artifact reduction using the ILRMA approach clearly improved (by over 70%) the averaged BCI performances using artifact-reduced data sufficiently for most needs of the BCI community. The extension of ICA families to supervised separation that leaves the discriminative ability would further improve the usability of BCIs for real-life environments in which artifacts frequently contaminate EEGs.