A spatiotemporal filtering methodology for single-trial ERP component estimation.

A new spatiotemporal filtering method for single-trial event-related potential (ERP) estimation is proposed. Instead of attempting to model the entire ERP waveform, the method relies on modeling ERP component descriptors (amplitude and latency) thru the spatial diversity of multichannel recordings, and thus, it is tailored to extract signals in negative SNR conditions. The model allows for both amplitude and latency variability in the ERP component under investigation. The extracted ERP component is constrained through a spatial filter to have minimal distance (with respect to some metric) in the temporal domain from a user-designed template component. The spatial filter may be interpreted as a noise canceller in the spatial domain. Study with both simulated data and real cognitive ERP data shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.