A novel hybrid method based on task-related component and canonical correlation analyses (H-TRCCA) for enhancing SSVEP recognition.

Introduction: Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) rely on the brain's response to visual stimuli. However, accurately recognizing target frequencies using training-based methods remains challenging due to the time-consuming calibration sessions required by subject-specific training methods. Method: To address this limitation, this study proposes a novel hybrid method called Hybrid task-related component and canonical correlation analysis (H-TRCCA). In the training phase, four spatial filters are derived using canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to maximize the correlation between the training data and reference signals. Additionally, a spatial filter is also computed using task-related component analysis (TRCA). In the test phase, correlation coefficients obtained from the CCA method are clustered using the k-means++ clustering algorithm. The cluster with the highest average correlation identifies the candidate stimuli. Finally, for each candidate, the correlation values are summed and combined with the TRCA-based correlation coefficients. Results: The H-TRCCA algorithm was validated using two publicly available benchmark datasets. Experimental results using only two training trials per frequency with 1s data length showed that H-TRCCA achieved average accuracies of 91.44% for Dataset I and 80.46% for Dataset II. Additionally, it achieved maximum average information transfer rates of 188.36 bits/min and 139.96 bits/min for Dataset I and II, respectively. Discussion: Remarkably H-TRCCA achieves comparable performance to other methods that require five trials, utilizing only two or three training trials. The proposed H-TRCCA method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, showing superior performance and robustness with limited calibration data.