Wavelet-ICA methodology for efficient artifact removal from Electroencephalographic recordings

Electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings are often contaminated by the artifacts, signals that have non-cerebral origin and that might mimic cognitive or pathologic activity and therefore distort the analysis of EEG. In this paper the issue of artifact extraction from Electroencephalographic data is addressed and a new technique for EEG artifact removal, based on the joint use of Wavelet transform and Independent Component Analysis (WICA), is presented and compared to two other techniques based on ICA and wavelet denoising. An artificial artifact-laden EEG dataset was created mixing a real EEG with a set of synthesized artifacts. This dataset was processed by WICA and the two other methods. The proposed technique had the best artifact separation performance for every kind of artifact also allowing for the minimum information loss.