A hybrid SVM/HMM based system for the state detection of individual finger movements from multichannel ECoG signals

A hybrid state detection algorithm is presented for the estimation of baseline and movement states which can be used to trigger a free paced neuroprostethic. The hybrid model was constructed by fusing a multiclass Support Vector Machine (SVM) with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), where the internal hidden state observation probabilities were represented by the discriminative output of the SVM. The proposed method was applied to the multichannel Electrocorticogram (ECoG) recordings of BCI competition IV to identify the baseline and movement states while subjects were executing individual finger movements. The results are compared to regular Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based HMM with the same number of states as SVM-based HMM structure. Our results indicate that the proposed hybrid state estimation method out-performs the standard HMM-based solution in all subjects studied with higher latency. The average latency of the hybrid decoder was approximately 290ms.