A study of motor imagery EEG classification based on feature fusion and attentional mechanisms

Introduction: Motor imagery EEG-based action recognition is an emerging field arising from the intersection of brain science and information science, which has promising applications in the fields of neurorehabilitation and human-computer collaboration. However, existing methods face challenges including the low signal-to-noise ratio of EEG signals, inter-subject variability, and model overfitting. Methods: We propose HA-FuseNet, an end-to-end motor imagery action classification network. This model integrates feature fusion and attention mechanisms to classify left hand, right hand, foot, and tongue movements. Its innovations include: (1) multi-scale dense connectivity, (2) hybrid attention mechanism, (3) global self-attention module, and (4) lightweight design for reduced computational overhead. Results: On BCI Competition IV Dataset 2A, HA-FuseNet achieved 77.89% average within-subject accuracy (8.42% higher than EEGNet) and 68.53% cross-subject accuracy. Conclusion: The model demonstrates robustness to spatial resolution variations and individual differences, effectively mitigating key challenges in motor imagery EEG classification.