Decoding olfactory EEG signals for different odor stimuli identification using wavelet-spatial domain feature.

Background: Decoding olfactory-induced electroencephalography (olfactory EEG) signals has gained significant attention in recent years, owing to its potential applications in several fields, such as disease diagnosis, multimedia applications, and brain-computer interaction (BCI). Extracting discriminative features from olfactory EEG signals with low spatial resolution and poor signal-to-noise ratio is vital but challenging for improving decoding accuracy.

New Methods: By combining discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with one-versus-rest common spatial pattern (OVR-CSP), we develop a novel feature, named wavelet-spatial domain feature (WSDF), to decode the olfactory EEG signals. First, DWT is employed on EEG signals for multilevel wavelet decomposition. Next, the DWT coefficients obtained at a specific level are subjected to OVR-CSP for spatial filtering. Correspondingly, the variance is extracted to generate a discriminative feature set, labeled as WSDF.

Results: To verify the effectiveness of WSDF, a classification of olfactory EEG signals was conducted on two data sets, i.e., a public EEG dataset 'Odor Pleasantness Perception Dataset (OPPD)', and a self-collected dataset, by using support vector machine (SVM) trained based on different cross-validation methods. Experimental results showed that on OPPD dataset, the proposed method achieved a best average accuracy of 100% and 94.47% for the eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions, respectively. Moreover, on our own dataset, the proposed method gave a highest average accuracy of 99.50%.

Comparison With Existing Methods: Compared with a wide range of EEG features and existing works on the same dataset, our WSDF yielded superior classification performance.

Conclusions: The proposed WSDF is a promising candidate for decoding olfactory EEG signals.