A Model for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition: CNN-Bi-LSTM with Attention Mechanism

Emotion analysis is the key technology in human–computer emotional interaction and has gradually become a research hotspot in the field of artificial intelligence. The key problems of emotion analysis based on EEG are feature extraction and classifier design. The existing methods of emotion analysis mainly use machine learning and rely on manually extracted features. As an end-to-end method, deep learning can automatically extract EEG features and classify them. However, most of the deep learning models of emotion recognition based on EEG still need manual screening and data pre-processing, and the accuracy and convenience are not high enough. Therefore, this paper proposes a CNN-Bi-LSTM-Attention model to automatically extract the features and classify emotions based on EEG signals. The original EEG data are used as input, a CNN and a Bi-LSTM network are used for feature extraction and fusion, and then the electrode channel weights are balanced through the attention mechanism layer. Finally, the EEG signals are classified to different kinds of emotions. An emotion classification experiment based on EEG is conducted on the SEED dataset to evaluate the performance of the proposed model. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper can effectively classify EEG emotions. The method was assessed on two distinctive classification tasks, one with three and one with four target classes. The average ten-fold cross-validation classification accuracy of this method is 99.55% and 99.79%, respectively, corresponding to three and four classification tasks, which is significantly better than the other methods. It can be concluded that our method is superior to the existing methods in emotion recognition, which can be widely used in many fields, including modern neuroscience, psychology, neural engineering, and computer science as well.