Dual-Domain Symmetry: A Frequency-Aware Residual U-Net for High-Fidelity EEG Artifact Removal

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive technique used to monitor brain activity but is prone to physiological artifacts, especially eye movements (EOG) and muscle contractions (EMG). These artifacts are non-stationary and frequently overlap with neural oscillation bands, making them difficult to separate accurately from genuine EEG activity. Conventional single-domain filters often fail to eliminate such interference, resulting in either residual noise or the unintended suppression of authentic EEG data. To address these limitations, we propose a Frequency-Aware Residual U-Net (FARU-Net), a dual-domain, frequency-aware residual architecture for EEG artifact removal designed to improve restoration fidelity. Unlike models based solely on temporal features, FARU-Net explicitly modulates the spectral properties of the signal in the latent space through a Frequency-aware Bottleneck Module (FBM), while simultaneously refining temporal details. Additionally, Attention Gates (AGs) are integrated into the skip connections to refine feature fusion and reduce residual noise while preserving salient waveform structures. Comparative experiments on the EEGdenoiseNet benchmark demonstrate that FARU-Net achieves strong overall performance for single-channel EEG restoration. Across five independent test groups, the proposed model attains a mean Pearson correlation coefficient (CC) of 0.9681 and a mean signal-to-noise ratio improvement (ΔSNR) of 26.66 dB. These results indicate that the proposed method effectively preserves both waveform morphology and spectral structure compared with conventional U-Net variants and CNN-based models.