A deep wavelet sparse autoencoder method for online and automatic electrooculographical artifact removal

Electrooculographical (EOG) artifacts are problematic to electroencephalographical (EEG) signal analysis and degrade performance of brain–computer interfaces. A novel, robust deep wavelet sparse autoencoder (DWSAE) method is presented and validated for fully automated EOG artifact removal. DWSAE takes advantage of wavelet transform and sparse autoencoder to become a universal EOG artifact corrector. After being trained without supervision, the sparse autoencoder performs EOG correction on time–frequency coefficients collected after brain wave signal wavelet decomposition. Corrected coefficients are then used for wavelet reconstruction of uncontaminated EEG signals. DWSAE is compared with five other methods: second-order blind identification, information maximization, joint approximation diagonalization of eigen-matrices, wavelet neural network (WNN) and wavelet thresholding (WT). Experimental results on a visual attention task dataset, a mental state recognition dataset and a semi-simulated contaminated EEG dataset show that DWSAE is capable of suppressing EOG artifacts effectively, while preserving the nature of background EEG signals. The mean square error of signals before and after correction by DWSAE on a semi-simulated contaminated EEG segment of 30 s is the lowest (65.62) when compared to the results produced by WNN and WT. DWSAE addresses limitations posed by these methods in three ways. First, DWSAE can be performed automatically and online in a single channel of EEG data; this has advantages over independent component analysis-based methods. Second, its results are robust and stable in comparison with those of other wavelet-based methods. Third, as an unsupervised learning scheme, DWSAE does not require the off-line training that is necessary for WNN and other supervised learning machine learning-based methods.