Feature Extraction from Regenerated EEG – A Better Approach for ICA Based Eye Blink Artifact Detection

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) decomposition is a commonly used technique for eye blink artifact detection from Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Feature extraction from the decomposed ICs is a prime step for blink detection. This paper presents a new model of eye blink detection for ICA based approach, where the decomposed ICs are projected to their corresponding EEG segments (ReEEG), and feature extraction is performed on the ReEEG instead of the IC. ReEEG represents the eye blink activity more distinctly. Hence, ReEEG-based feature extraction is more potential in detecting eye blink artifacts than the traditional IC-based feature extraction.

This paper employs twelve EEG features to substantiate the superiority of ReEEG over IC. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used as a classifier. A dataset, having 2638 clinical EEG epochs, is employed. All the considered twelve features are extracted from ReEEG and fed to SVM one at a time for blink detection. Then the obtained results are compared with an IC-based model with the same features.

The comparison reveals the success of the proposed ReEEG-based blink detection approach over the traditional IC-based approach. Accuracy, precision, recall, and f1 scores are calculated as performance measuring metrics. For almost all features, ReEEG-based approach achieved up to 12.25% higher accuracy, 24.95% higher precision, 13.49% higher recall, and 12.89% higher f1 score than the IC-based traditional method.

The proposed model will be useful for researchers in dealing with the eye blink artifacts of EEG signals with more efficacy.