Real-time removal of ocular artifacts from EEG based on independent component analysis and manifold learning

Frequent occurrence of ocular artifacts leads to serious problems in interpreting and analyzing the electroencephalogram (EEG). In the present paper, a novel and robust technique is proposed to eliminate ocular artifacts from EEG signals in real time. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is used to decompose EEG signals. The features of topography and power spectral density of those components are extracted. Moreover, we introduce manifold learning algorithm, a recently popular dimensionality reduction technique, to reduce the dimensionality of initial features, and then those new features are fed to a classifier to identify ocular artifacts components. A k-nearest neighbor classifier is adopted to classify components because classification results show that manifold learning with the nearest neighbor algorithm works best. Finally, the artifact removal method proposed here is evaluated by the comparisons of EEG data before and after artifact removal. The results indicate that the method proposed could remove ocular artifacts effectively from EEG signals with little distortion of the underlying brain signals and be satisfied the real-time application.