Local and global convolutional transformer-based motor imagery EEG classification.

Transformer, a deep learning model with the self-attention mechanism, combined with the convolution neural network (CNN) has been successfully applied for decoding electroencephalogram (EEG) signals in Motor Imagery (MI) Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). However, the extremely non-linear, nonstationary characteristics of the EEG signals limits the effectiveness and efficiency of the deep learning methods. In addition, the variety of subjects and the experimental sessions impact the model adaptability. In this study, we propose a local and global convolutional transformer-based approach for MI-EEG classification. The local transformer encoder is combined to dynamically extract temporal features and make up for the shortcomings of the CNN model. The spatial features from all channels and the difference in hemispheres are obtained to improve the robustness of the model. To acquire adequate temporal-spatial feature representations, we combine the global transformer encoder and Densely Connected Network to improve the information flow and reuse. To validate the performance of the proposed model, three scenarios including within-session, cross-session and two-session are designed. In the experiments, the proposed method achieves up to 1.46%, 7.49% and 7.46% accuracy improvement respectively in the three scenarios for the public Korean dataset compared with current state-of-the-art models. For the BCI competition IV 2a dataset, the proposed model also achieves a 2.12% and 2.21% improvement for the cross-session and two-session scenarios respectively. The results confirm that the proposed approach can effectively extract much richer set of MI features from the EEG signals and improve the performance in the BCI applications.