Phase Preservation Neural Network for Electroencephalography Classification in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Task

Neuroscience studies have demonstrated the phase-locked characteristics of some early event-related potential (ERP) components evoked by stimuli. In this study, we propose a phase preservation neural network (PPNN) to learn phase information to improve the Electroencephalography (EEG) classification in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. The PPNN consists of three major modules that can produce spatial and temporal representations with the high discriminative ability of the EEG features for classification. We first adopt a stack of dilated temporal convolution layers to extract temporal dynamics while avoiding the loss of phase information. Considering the intrinsic channel dependence of the EEG data, a spatial convolution layer is then applied to obtain the spatial-temporal representation of the input EEG signal. Finally, a fully connected layer is adopted to extract higher-level features for the final classification. The experiments are conducted on two public and one collected EEG datasets from the RSVP task, in which we evaluated the performance and explored the capability of phase preservation of our PPNN model and visualized the extracted features. The experimental results indicate the superiority of the proposed PPNN when compared with previous methods, suggesting the PPNN is a robust model for EEG classification in RSVP task.