TRCA-Net: using TRCA filters to boost the SSVEP classification with convolutional neural network

Abstract Objective. The steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain–computer interface has received extensive attention in research due to its simple system, less training data, and high information transfer rate. There are currently two prominent methods dominating the classification of SSVEP signals. One is the knowledge-based task-related component analysis (TRCA) method, whose core idea is to find the spatial filters by maximizing the inter-trial covariance. The other is the deep learning-based approach, which directly learns a classification model from data. However, how to integrate the two methods to achieve better performance has not been studied before. Approach. In this study, we develop a novel algorithm named TRCA-Net (TRCA-Net) to enhance SSVEP signal classification, which enjoys the advantages of both the knowledge-based method and the deep model. Specifically, the proposed TRCA-Net first performs TRCA to obtain spatial filters, which extract task-related components of data. Then the TRCA-filtered features from different filters are rearranged as new multi-channel signals for a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for classification. Introducing the TRCA filters to a deep learning-based approach improves the signal-to-noise ratio of input data, hence benefiting the deep learning model. Main results. We evaluate the performance of TRCA-Net using two publicly available large-scale benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of TRCA-Net. Additionally, offline and online experiments separately testing ten and five subjects further validate the robustness of TRCA-Net. Further, we conduct ablation studies on different CNN backbones and demonstrate that our approach can be transplanted into other CNN models to boost their performance. Significance. The proposed approach is believed to have a promising potential for SSVEP classification and promote its practical applications in communication and control. The code is available at https://github.com/Sungden/TRCA-Net .