Removal of Electrooculogram Artifacts from Electroencephalogram Using Canonical Correlation Analysis with Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition

Electrooculogram (EOG) is one of the major artifacts in the design of electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain computer interfaces (BCIs). That removing EOG artifacts automatically while retaining more neural data will benefit for further feature extraction and classification. In order to remove EOG artifacts automatically as well as reserve more useful information from raw EEG, this paper proposes a novel blind source separation method called CCA-EEMD (canonical correlation analysis, ensemble empirical mode decomposition). Technically, the major steps of CCA-EEMD are as follows: Firstly, the multiple-channel original EEG signals are separated into several uncorrelated components using CCA. Then, the EOG component can be identified automatically by its kurtosis value. Next, the identified EOG component is decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by EEMD. The IMFs uncorrelated to the EOG component are recognized and retained, and a new component will be constructed by the retained IMFs. Finally, the clean EEG signals are reconstructed. Keep in mind that the novelty of this paper is that the identified EOG component is not removed directly but used to extract neural EEG data, which would keep more effective information. Our tests with the data of seven subjects demonstrate that the proposed method has distinct advantages over other two commonly used methods in terms of average root mean square error [37.71 ± 0.14 (CCA-EEMD), 44.72 ± 0.13 (CCA), 49.59 ± 0.16 (ICA)], signal-to-noise ratio [3.59 ± 0.24 (CCA-EEMD), −6.53 ± 0.18(CCA), −8.43 ± 0.26 (ICA)], and classification accuracy [0.88 ± 0.002 (CCA-EEMD), 0.79 ± 0.001 (CCA), 0.73 ± 0.002 (ICA)]. The proposed method can not only remove EOG artifacts automatically but also keep the integrity of EEG data to the maximum extent.