Automatic removal of the eye blink artifact from EEG using an ICA-based template matching approach

Independent component analysis (ICA) proves to be effective in the removing the ocular artifact from electroencephalogram recordings (EEG). While using ICA in ocular artifact correction, a crucial step is to correctly identify the artifact components among the decomposed independent components. In most previous works, this step of selecting the artifact components was manually implemented, which is time consuming and inconvenient when dealing with a large amount of EEG data. We present a new method which automatically selects the eye blink artifact components based on the pattern of their scalp topographies, which can be exemplified as a template matching approach. The feasibility of using a fixed template for singling out the eye blink component after ICA decomposition was validated by an experiment in which 18 subjects among the 21 subjects involved exhibited a highly consistent pattern of eye blink scalp topographies. Since only the spatial feature is employed for singling out the eye blink component, the proposed method is very efficient and easy to implement. Objective evaluation of the real results shows that the proposed algorithm can remove the eye blink artifact from the EEG while causing little distortion to the underlying brain activities.