SDDA: Spatial Distillation based Distribution Alignment for Cross-Headset EEG Classification.

Abstract

A non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) enables direct interaction between the user and external devices, typically via electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. This paper tackles the problem of decoding EEG signals across different headsets, which is challenging due to differences in the number and locations of the electrodes. We propose a spatial distillation based distribution alignment (SDDA) approach for heterogeneous cross-headset transfer in non-invasive BCIs. SDDA uses first spatial distillation to make use of the full set of electrodes, and then input/feature/output space distribution alignments to cope with the significant differences between the source and target domains. Extensive experiments on six EEG datasets from two BCI paradigms demonstrated that SDDA achieved superior performance in both offline unsupervised domain adaptation and online supervised domain adaptation scenarios, consistently outperforming 10 classical and state-of-the-art transfer learning algorithms. Our approach enables effective transfer between heterogenous EEG headsets, improving and expediting BCI calibration.