EEG motor imagery decoding: a framework for comparative analysis with channel attention mechanisms

Objective. The objective of this study is to investigate the application of various channel attention mechanisms within the domain of brain-computer interface (BCI) for motor imagery decoding. Channel attention mechanisms can be seen as a powerful evolution of spatial filters traditionally used for motor imagery decoding. This study systematically compares such mechanisms by integrating them into a lightweight architecture framework to evaluate their impact. Approach. We carefully construct a straightforward and lightweight baseline architecture designed to seamlessly integrate different channel attention mechanisms. This approach is contrary to previous works which only investigate one attention mechanism and usually build a very complex, sometimes nested architecture. Our framework allows us to evaluate and compare the impact of different attention mechanisms under the same circumstances. The easy integration of different channel attention mechanisms as well as the low computational complexity enables us to conduct a wide range of experiments on four datasets to thoroughly assess the effectiveness of the baseline model and the attention mechanisms. Results. Our experiments demonstrate the strength and generalizability of our architecture framework as well as how channel attention mechanisms can improve the performance while maintaining the small memory footprint and low computational complexity of our baseline architecture. Significance. Our architecture emphasizes simplicity, offering easy integration of channel attention mechanisms, while maintaining a high degree of generalizability across datasets, making it a versatile and efficient solution for electroencephalogram motor imagery decoding within BCIs.