Correlated Component Analysis for Enhancing the Performance of SSVEP-Based Brain-Computer Interface.

A new method for steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) frequency recognition is proposed to enhance the performance of SSVEP-based brain-computer interface (BCI). Correlated component analysis (CORCA) is introduced, which originally was designed to find linear combinations of electrodes that are consistent across subjects and maximally correlated between them. We propose a CORCA algorithm to learn spatial filters with multiple blocks of individual training data for SSVEP-based BCI scenario. The spatial filters are used to remove background noises by combining the multichannel electroencephalogram signals. We conduct a comparison between the proposed CORCA-based and the task-related component analysis (TRCA) based methods using a 40-class SSVEP benchmark data set recorded from 35 subjects. Our experimental study validates the efficiency of the CORCA-based method, and the extensive comparison results indicate that the CORCA-based method significantly outperforms the TRCA-based method. Superior performance demonstrates that the proposed method holds the promising potential to achieve satisfactory performance for SSVEP-based BCI with a large number of targets.