Feature extraction of motor imagery EEG signals based on wavelet packet decomposition

Feature extraction in brain-computer interface (BCI) work is an important task that significantly affects the success of brain signal classification. In this paper, a feature extraction method of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals based on wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) is used. The coefficients mean of wavelet packet decomposition and wavelet packet energy of special sub-bands are employed as the original features. The Fisher discriminant analysis (FDA) is used to measure the separabilities of those features. The features which had a higher separability will be considered as effective ones and then the final feature vector are formed. A feature vector is obtained by combining the selected features from six channels. Then, the features are classified by using the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) algorithm. We obtained significant improvement for the speed and accuracy of the classification for data set Ia, which is a typical representative of one kind of BCI competition 2003 data. The classification results have proved the effectiveness of the proposed method.