Mental EEG Analysis based on Independent Component Analysis
Xiaopei Wu Xiaojing Guo
The Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing & Signal Processing,
Ministry of Education. China, of Anhui University 230039
Email: wxp2001@ahu.edu.cn
ABSTRACT
The patterns of EEG will change with mental task
performed by the subject. In the field of EEG signal
analysis and application, the study to get the patterns of
mental EEG and then to use them to classib mental
tasks has the significant scientific meaning and great
application value. But for the reasons of different
artifacts contained in EEG, the pattern detection in
EEG produced from normal mental .states is a vely
d@cult prohlem. In this paper, Independent
Component Analysis is applied to EEG signals collected
from different mental tasks .The experiment results
show that when one subject performs a single mental
task in different trails, the independent components of
EEG are very similar. It means that the independent
components can he used as the mental EEG patterns to
classij$ the different mental tasks.
Keywords: EEG, mental task, Independent
Component Analysis
1. INTRODUCTION
The classification of mental tasks based on
Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals is closely
related to the research on brain-computer interface(BCI),
which is a kind of communication, as we called “no
language and no behavior comunication” , ‘between
human brain and machine. And now BCI has become a
common interest in the international field of
bioelectrical signal processing and has great scientific
significance and broad application area. At present,
many approaches to realize the interaction between
brain and computer have been put forward, such as
using VEP (visual-evoked potentials), ERP
(event-related potentials) or EEG of different mental
tasks. Comparing with other BCI methods[l]. We
suggest that the method based on mental EEG signals
has some advantages, for example, its realization need
not the outside stimulation and body behavior. In
addition, early studies have showed that the basic
rhythms in EEG (such as alpha burst and theta burst)
will change and different power spectrum distributions
* This research is supported by National Nature Science Foundation of China (60271024) and Nature Science Foundation of Anhui
province.
321 Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Image and Signal Processing and Analysis (2003)
will appear in the right and left hemisphere when a
subject performs different mental tasks. These
phenomena make it possible to detect the different
mental tasks based on mental EEG signals. Presently,
many approaches have been proposed to perform the
classification of mental tasks, such as AR model,
unsymmetrical power spectrum analysis, etc [2][3]. The
classified results show that the methods mentioned
above are effective to a single subject, but for groups,
the classification results are not satisfying.
In this paper, the ICA algorithm is applied to the
pattern analysis of mental EEG signals via different
mental tasks. By studying the EEG independent sources
and their projection on human scalp, we can find that
some stable independent components always appear
when the subject repeats the same mental tasks. The
preliminary results show that ICA may be a promising
method to enhance the mental EEG patterns that can be
used for the classification of different mental tasks.
The research in this paper mainly focuses on the
pattern analysis individual mental EEG. And it also
involves the study of group mental EEG, but which is
not the main point. we suppose that the research on
similarity and difference of group mental EEG cannot
get reliable results by now.
2. ICA and infomax algorithm for the blind
separation
EEG signals are generally recorded through
multi-channels. Some important mutual information
existing between pairs of channels is greatly valuable to
reveal brain state information, build models, and
establish locations etc. Due to the strong randomness
and nonstationarity of EEG, some processing methods
commonly used, such as Fourier analysis and Wavelet
transform, are generally applied to the analysis of
single-channel EEG data, but inefficient to disclose the
relation of different channels. The ICA algorithm is a
statistical signal processing method developed in the
90’s of 20th century, which can effectively separate the
statistically independent source signals from observed
multichannel signals 14’. ICA can be simply described as
follows: assuming that there are N observed signals x,,
i=l,.. .,N. get from N sensors, and each signal is a linear
 mixture of N independent source signals si, i=l, ...,N.,
viz.
x = AS
Where x=[xl, ...,xN]T is observed signal vector and
s=[sl, ...,SNIT is source signal vector; A is an unknown
NxN mixing matrix. We expect that the source signal s
can be separated from the observed signal vector x.
However, as the independent source s and mixing
matrix A both are unknown, the traditional signal
processing methods cannot solve the problem of blind
source separation (BSS). Up to now, a lot of theories
and algorithms for ICA have been presented and used to
estimate the separation matrix W so that the
independent sources can be successfully separated from
observed multichannel signals, namely
s = wx
Among various algorithms for
extended-lnfomax alogorthm[S] is the most typical ICA
algorithm, which is based on the maximum information
transmition theory and a single-layer neural network
with two switchable nonlinearity. They show that
maximizing the joint entropy H(y) of the output of a
neural processor can approximately minimize the
mutual information among the output components
yi=g(ui), where g(ui) is an invertible bounded
nonlinearity and u=[ul, ...,UNIT, ui is the estimation of
source si. The separation matrix coefficient wij is
adjusted by gradient algorithm so as to maximize the
joint entropy of nonlinear output, such that makes the
eq.2.3 maximum.
H ( y ) = N ( v , ; . . ~ ~ ) = H ~ , ) + . . . + H ( v , , , ) - I ( v , ; (2.3)
where H(yi) are the marginal entropies of the outputs
and I(yl,.,.yN) is their mutual information
By using eq.2.3 as optimization objective function
and to adjust the separation matrix W, we search for the
maximum value point of H(y), which corresponds to the
final separation matrix for BSS that can make ui
approximate to the unknown source si. A formula
generally used to adjust W is
I - tanh(u)u' - u u r
I + tanh(u)ur - uu' 1 W
W
k, = 1 : Sup - Gauss
=[I-Ktanh(u)u' -uur
k, = -1 :Sub -Gauss
(2.4)
where, k, are elements of N-dimensional diagonal
matrix K. As the EEG signals contain many artifacts
and environment noise with sub- or super-Gaussian
distributions, the extended infomax algorithm is
commonly applied to extract EEG independent
components.
3. Mental EEG based on I C A
The purpose of the patterns analysis and extraction
of mental EEG is to classify the mental tasks using the
EEG signals of mental tasks: such as doing
mathematical operations, imagining the revolve of the
(2.1) objects, counting numbers etc, and then to apply it in
the studies on the brain-computer interface technology
and the brain cognition. The difficulty in the
classification of mental tasks based on EEG is how to
extract the steady EEG patterns. Since the EEG
recording is liable to be affected by a lot of artifacts
(EMG, EOG and ECG), environment noise, line noise,
the psychology or physiology state of the subject and
how the subject tried his best to do the mental tasks etc,
it is difficult to obtain the steady mental patterns from
EEG only using the time or frequency domain method.
ICA is a fairly new method to analyze the EEG signals.
It is applied for BSS based on the observed
(2.2) multichannel EEG data that are statistically independent
BSS, so as to recover the source signals. In these source
signals, some are relatively clear physical sources, such
as ECG, eye movements, muscle noise etc. Those
independent components separated from the
multichannel EEG are artifacts and cannot be used to
classify the mental tasks. However, by applying the ICA
algorithm, we can effectively remove the artifacts and
obtain the artifact-free EEG independent components.
And we also expect that ICA can succeed in getting the
steady independent component models of mental EEG
and using them to classify the corresponding mental
tasks.
In this paper, we perform the analysis on the
independent component models o f mental EEG. The
EEG data are collected from seven subjects by doing
..~,~)
four kinds of mental tasks. Each task was repeated at 5
to 15 times. And the data are set with 7 channels
including one EOG channel. The location of the
recording electrodes is C3, C4, P3, P4, 01, 0 2 and one
simultaneously recorded EOG Figure. 1 shows one
subject's EEG data obtained from doing maths tasks
twice, which are a recording of I O sec at a sampling rate
of 250Hz. From the figure, we can see that the EEG
recordings contain obvious eye movement artifacts.
However, it's almost impossible to successfully detect
the effective pattern from the original EEG data
containing a lot of known and unknown artifacts just
based on the analysis in the time and frequency domain.
In order to obtain the stable patterns of mental EEG,
the artifacts should be removed as clean as possible.
ICA has its distinctive superiority in the EEG artifacts
remova1[61[71[81. Figure.2 shows the ICA results from
using the extended lnfomax algorithm on the EEG data
of Figure.1. The EOG channel also participates in the
computing in order to remove EOG artifacts in EEG
data. In Figure.1, the EOG recording appears in all
channels of original EEG data. But from Figure.2, we
can find the EOG artifact is concentrated in component
1 and no more appears in other independent
components, which indicates the separation of EOG
artifact is resultful
Proc. ISPAO3 328
 1

0 IO 0 10 0 10 0 10
time(sj time(s) timeis) timeis)
(4 (b) (a) (b)
Figure 1 EEC data collected from twice maths operation on Figure 2 the ICA components obtained from
one subject. The location of electrodes from the top the EEG data in Figure I
down is C3, C4, P3, P 4 , 0 1 , 0 2 , EOG

4.0016 1.2174 1.6313 -0.2350 -3.5?68 -1.2661-4.5617

By applying ICA, we expect that some relatively 5.7030 0.5226 2.3164 2.4428 -0.8919 -0.7098 -2.3224
stable ICA components in EEG can be found when 3.1007 2.2660 1.1407 0.0092 -4.0538 -1.1991 -1.3667
performing the same mental task and can he used as the
A , = (3.1374 2.3986 2.2769-0.2062 -1.3465 -2.0994 -0.7347
panerns for the classification of the mental tasks. So we
1.6294 2.6822 0.2461 0.2106 -1.9015 -3.7420 -0.5750
need to do some comparisons of the independent
1.4271 7.1486 0.8470 -0.2608 0.0433 -2.2837 -0.8365
components got from different trials. Comparing two
groups of independent components in Figure.2, we can 45.304 0.2975 1.9304 -2.2594 1.6338 2.4672 -1.1043
notice that they have many similarities. For example, the
activations of independent component 2,4 in Figure.2(a) 4.0540 -3.8194 6.6163 0.1222 0.0281 0.6709 0.6584
highly approximate to the component 5,7 in Figure.Z(b) 3.9442 -5.3874 3.2847 0.4598 0.7759 0.5679 -2.3096
respectively. Indeed, it is not enough to judge the 2.7342 -3.2170 3.7711 2.0447 0.7730 1.2177 0.4954
siniilarity only depending on intuitive comparison of
A, = 2.5212 -4.9884 1.3966 0.2567 1.7?45 1.1464 0.4696
time waves. A reasonable approach is to match the two
1.6502 -0.9331 2.2496 0.4048 1.7353 2.2617 0.4092
groups of independent components by comparing their
1.6049 -1.9080 1.4532 0.5292 6.2863 1.3180 0.9578
respective energy distributions at scalp electrodes and
then to measure their similarity degree by using 34.989 -1.4067 1.5769-3.0278 0.0574 -0.3796 -0.150;
conelation coefficient. And then according to it, we can
primarily determine the steady ICA components
appearing in the same mental task. The linear mixture
relation expressed in eq.2.1 indicates that the columns of
mixing matrix A account for the projections of the
independent sources at each electrode on the scalp.
The mixing matrixes A t , A2corresponding to the two
groups ICA components shown in Figure.2 are A , and
A2.
Setting aIj, aZj ;j=l,”’,l respectively as the columns
of At and A2, and the result from using correlation-based
algorithm to perform the similarity matching on the
columns of the two mixing matrixes is shown in Figure.3 The matching result based on the
Figure.3. columns of mixing matrixes A , , A ~

329 Proc. ISPA03

 a,, a12 a,, a,, an3 ai6 a,, locations on the scalp, which can be rationally used in the
mental task classification.
Considering that EEG signals contain many useful
components with specific frequency hands (such as hasic
rhythms, 40Hz component etc.), we can firstly
decompose each channel signal into suh-hands so as to
enhance the useful components and then to process them
with the ICA algorithm.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Fieure 4 the scalr, mar, of the columns
~~

of mixing matrixes

Figure.4 directly demonstrates the projections of the

two groups ICA components in Figure.2 on the scalp
electrodes, and it suggests that the ICA components
extracted from the multichannel EEG signals are vety
similar when one subject performs the same
multiplication mental task. To further confirm the
conclusion, we applied ICA to analyze ten groups EEG
data observed from doing ten multiplication mental tasks.
The scalp maps of the matched ten groups ICs can he
seen in Figure 5 . The seven maps in each row are the
results from one experiment. By performing ten of such
experiment, we can get Io x 7 scalp maps of ICA
components, and ten scalp maps in first column indicate
the mapping from EOG onto the scalp electrodes, which
are not directly related to the pattern analysis of mental
activity. Other 6 columns maps show the mapping of
EEG independent components on the scalp electrodes,
and we can seethat they are vety similar.
According to the approach mentioned above, we
have analyzed EEG signals of other kinds of mental tasks
and obtained the similar results. It is a key to us that the
columns of mixing matrix can be used as the patterns of
mental EEG, which can reduce the dimensionality of
feature vectors and is favorable to automatically perform
the classification of the mental tasks based on the EEG
data.

4. Discussions

As the spectra of EEG signal and noise overlap, The

traditional methods can only compromise between
eliminating artifacts and protecting useful signals so that
the result is not very satisfying. However, ICA method
can protect the useful signals as well as obviously Figure 5 the scalp maps of ten groups
weaken even entirely remove the artifacts in ICA components
multichannel EEG signals, this characteristic of ICA is
the key to get stable EEG patterns.
The research in the paper only used 6 channels EEG
data, because we expect to perform the classification of
the mental tasks by using less data in order to improve
the computation efficiency. The researches will be further
developed to compare the results by using ICA on the
different number of the channels so that we can
determine the number of channels and the electrode

Proc. ISPAO3 330

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331 Proc. ISPA03