Filter bank temporally local canonical correlation analysis for short time window SSVEPs classification

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) method and its extended methods have been widely and successfully applied to the frequency recognition in SSVEP-based BCI systems. As a state-of-the-art extended method, filter bank canonical correlation analysis has higher accuracy and information transmission rate (ITR) than CCA. However, in the CCA method, the temporally local structure of samples has not been well considered. In this correspondence, we proposed termed temporally local canonical correlation analysis (TCCA). In this new method, the original covariance matrix was replaced by the temporally local covariance matrix. Furthermore, we proposed an improved frequency identification method of filter bank based on TCCA, named filter bank temporally local canonical correlation analysis (FBTCCA). In the offline environment, we used a leave-one-subject-out validation strategy on datasets of ten testees to optimize the parameters of TCCA and FBTCCA and evaluate the two algorithms. The experimental results affirm that TCCA markedly outperformed CCA, and FBTCCA obtained the highest accuracy among the four methods. This study corroborates that TCCA-based approaches have great potential for implementing short time window SSVEP-based BCI systems.