Intra- and inter-channel deep convolutional neural network with dynamic label smoothing for multichannel biosignal analysis

Efficient processing of multichannel biosignals has significant application values in the fields of healthcare and human-machine interaction. Although previous research has achieved high recognition performance with deep convolutional neural networks, several key challenges still remain: (1) Effective extraction of spatial and temporal features from the multichannel biosignals. (2) Appropriate trade-off between performance and complexity for improving applicability in real-life situations given that traditional machine learning and 2D-based CNN approaches often involve excessive preprocessing steps or model parameters; and (3) Generalization ability of neural networks to compensate for domain difference and to reduce overfitting during training process. To address challenges 1 and 2, we propose a 1D-based deep intra and inter channel (I2C) convolution neural network. The I2C convolutional block is introduced to replace the standard convolutional layer, further extending it to several state-of-the-art modules, with the intent of extracting more effective features from multichannel biosignals with fewer parameters. To address challenge 3, we integrate a branch model into the main model to perform dynamic label smoothing, enabling the model to learn domain difference and improve its generalization ability. Experiments were conducted on three public multichannel biosignals databases, namely ISRUC-S3, HEF and Ninapro-DB1. The results suggest that the proposed method exhibits significant competitive advantages in accuracy, complexity, and generalization ability.